Joshua Specht has 3 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is Red Meat Republic.
Red Meat Republic
Summary
How beef conquered America and gave rise to the modern industrial food complex By the late 19th century, Americans rich and poor had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States had gone from small-scale, localized operations to a highly centralized industry spanning the country, with cattle bred on ranches in the rural West, slaughtered in Chicago, and consumed in the nation’s rapidly growing cities. Red Meat Republic tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry and who would bear its heavy costs. Joshua Specht puts people at the heart of his story - the big cattle ranchers who helped to drive the nation’s westward expansion, the meatpackers who created a radically new kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and the stockyard workers who were subjected to the shocking and unsanitary conditions described by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle. Specht brings to life a turbulent era marked by Indian wars, Chicago labor unrest, and food riots in the streets of New York. He reveals how the enduring success of the cattle-beef complex - centralized, low cost, and meatpacker dominated - was a consequence of the meatpackers’ ability to make their interests overlap with those of a hungry public, while the interests of struggling ranchers, desperate workers, and bankrupt butchers took a backseat. America - and the American table - would never be the same again. Compelling and unfailingly enjoyable, Red Meat Republic reveals the complex history of exploitation and innovation behind the food we consume today.
©2019 Joshua Specht (P)2019 Princeton University Press
A Macat Analysis of Alfred W. Crosby's The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492
Summary
Environmental factors shape our history just as much as - and sometimes more than - human factors. That's the premise of Alfred W. Crosby's 1972 work The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, a key text in environmental history. While earlier scholars emphasized cultural and technological factors as defining the way our world developed, Crosby argues that nonhuman factors, such as the exchange of plants, animals, and microbes between the Old and New Worlds had more overall impact. "The most important changes brought on by the Columbian voyages were biological in nature," he says. Crosby was one of the first historians to look at the importance of the spread of certain food crops and diseases in relation to the development of history, to show it was not simply political and social issues that counted. The Columbian Exchange introduces the idea that current human societies are also the product of a wider set of biological relationships, and need to be understood in these contexts.
©2016 Macat Inc (P)2016 Macat Inc
A Macat Analysis of Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
Summary
Before Bernard Bailyn published The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution in 1967, it was generally believed that the Revolution was driven both by social conflict between colonial settlers and the ruling British government, and by differences between classes in American society. Bailyn had a different view. He said that it was radical ideas that fired the American Revolution, and that the Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, and political struggle. Bailyn showed how American colonists were moved by a strain of radical anti-authoritarian thought that cherished individual liberty and distrusted centralized power. In Bailyn's view, revolutionaries in the colonies felt their own oppression was part of a greater whole, part of "a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world - a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption." Considered one of the most influential 20th-century works on the American Revolution, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution won Bailyn the first of two Pulitzer Prizes. He was also awarded the Bancroft Prize for the work - the highest honor an American history book can receive.
©2016 Macat Inc (P)2016 Macat Inc