This dissertation examines the establishment and influence of the International Livestock Exposition, an annual show that began in Chicago in 1900 and that served as the central hub of the national livestock improvement movement. Industrial meatpacking firms and land-grant university professors worked together to transform the genetic composition and physiology of American meat-producing animals. Packers hosted the Exposition at the Union Stockyards to address market irregularities in quality and supply. University researchers intended to solve a larger set of problems that included rural population decline, the need for more food output to feed a growing population, and diminishing soil fertility. These unlikely partners created the International to eliminate inferior, or “scrub,” livestock. The International played a pivotal role in remaking livestock genotypes and phenotypes. Its organizers and participants favored “improved” animals descended from purebred, British livestock with recorded ancestries—a preference rooted in the reformers’ pseudo-scientific belief in eugenics. Purebred animals had standard bodies with a narrow set of physiological outcomes, which amounted to biotic technology. But genetic homogeneity was only a building block for improvement. The International also employed contests, demonstrations, and advocacy to reconfigure American livestock by making them smaller, more compact, and early-maturing. This study also analyzes the larger shift in American agriculture toward the Corn Belt model of grain feeding. Treating animals as dynamic historical agents, it suggests that machinery, tractors, seeds, and implements did not alone accomplish the industrialization of agriculture. Meat-producing cattle, sheep, and pigs were a requisite component in an emerging industrial sequence. These grain-fed modern livestock and their farmer caretakers fit into a developing web of mutually dependent agricultural specialists. The International united this movement into a singular body at the end of each year in Chicago, and in the process, shaped American agricultural practices and encouraged farm specialization until the show closed in 1975. Sources consulted include land-grant university research and publications, meatpacker records and propaganda, and newspaper and agricultural journal articles.

Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2009. / Title from screen (viewed on August 28, 2009). Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Marianne Wokeck. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-99).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / As historians have expanded their interests from focusing on great men and groundbreaking events to perspectives that explore everyday experiences or ordinary people, odor emerges as an important interpretative lens. Understanding the olfactory history of communities, especially what types of odors were present and how people perceived and reacted to them, enlarges historians’ understanding of the life experiences and behaviors of people in the past. The historical study of odor provides insights into how quality of life and standards of living have changed over time. Understanding how people of different times reacted to odors suggests how they perceived the sensory world around them, including people living close by. In this thesis, I examine the olfactory conditions of the neighborhood surrounding the Union Stockyards and associated meat processing facilities on Chicago’s south side in the first decade of the twentieth century. During this period, an overpowering combination of putrid odors characterized this neighborhood, known as Back of the Yards. Various factors contributed to this malodorous “smellscape,” and it impacted the quality of life of the predominantly immigrant communities that made up the workforce and residents of that neighborhood.