Joshua Specht

By the late nineteenth century, Americans, both rich and poor, had come to expect high-quality fresh beef with almost every meal. Beef production in the United States transformed from small-scale, localised operations to a highly centralised industry spanning the country. This book tells the remarkable story of the violent conflict over who would reap the benefits of this new industry...

One criticism of history is that historians all too often study it in isolation, failing to take advantage of models and evidence from scholars in other disciplines. This is not a charge that can be laid at the door of Alfred Crosby. His book The Columbian Exchange not only incorporates the results of wide reading in the hard sciences, anthropology,...