Joshua Specht
Department of History
Assistant Professor
- History of meat in the U.S.
- History of food
- History of American Business / capitalism
- Environmental history
- Settlement of American West
Specht in the News
Iowa Capital Dispatch
Meatpacking plants mostly pollute low-income, communities of color, EPA data shows
October 20, 2024
Meatpacking used to be a heavily unionized industry that employed predominantly white workers. Up until the 1960s and ’70s, many plants were centralized in larger cities and had robust union workforces, said Joshua Specht, an environmental and business historian at the University of Notre Dame and author of “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America.”
NPR
Men, Beef, and a Climate Solution
September 15, 2024
Joshua Specht, historian at the University of Notre Dame, says red meat eating has long been connected to ideas about our primordial ancestors, and there's marketing. Specht says that as long as beef has been mass-produced, the industry has used ideas of masculinity to sell beef to men. In the late 1800s, canned beef companies sold beef with images of lumberjacks, miners, soldiers and cowboys.
The New York Times
The Rise and Fall of Prime-Rib Nation
December 24, 2023
We see on holidays and special occasions the times when the kind of longer traditions and deeper histories of how we relate to food come out in ritual,” said Joshua Specht, the author of “Red Meat Republic” and an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.
BYU Radio
How Beef Changed America
August 06, 2021
Guest: Joshua Specht, visiting assistant professor, University of Notre Dame, and author of “Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America”.