Examines the height of students who attended The Citadel, the military academy in Charleston in the late-19th and the first half of the 20th century. Shows a long stagnation in the biological standard of living in this part of the South until the 1910s, when it began to increase substantially.

Argues that the Industrial Revolution is best conceptualized as having grown out of a process that began millennia earlier, and became possible only when the European populations were able to escape from the Malthusian trap which constrained their growth in prior centuries.

Examines the Physical Stature of The elite students attending the École Polytechnique military academy in the Early Nineteenth century. Concludes that their height was some 7 cm greater than that of average French youth their age.

Argues that the decline in physical stature of the American population beginning with 1835 was related to the concomitants of the onset of modern economic growth and not entirely to changes in the disease environment.

We estimate the height of various European populations in the first half of the 18th century. English and Irish male heights are estimated at c. 65 inches (165 cm), and c. 66 inches (168 cm) respectively. These values are below those obtained from the only other sample available for the period...

The physical stature of lower- and upper-class English youth are compared to one another and to their European and North American counterparts. The height gap between the rich and poor was the greatest in England, reaching 22 cm at age 16. The poverty-stricken English children were shorter for...

The height of the French male population of the Ancien Régime is estimated, on the basis of military records, to have been about 162 cm in the 17th century. This extremely short stature implies that, “the crisis of the 17th century” had an immense impact on the human organism itself. The...

Objective: We use the complete set of NHES and NHANES data collected between 1959 and 2004 in order to construct trends for the physical stature of the non-Hispanic white and black US adult population and compare them to those of Western- and Northern-Europeans. Method: Regression analysis is...

Within the course of the 20th century the American population went through a metamorphosis from being the tallest in the world, to being among the most overweight. The American height advantage over Western and Northern Europeans was between 3 and 9 cm in the middle of the 19th century....

Physical stature is used as a proxy for the biological standard of living in the two Germanies before and after unification in an analysis of a cross-sectional sample (1998) of adult heights, as well as among military recruits of the 1990s. West Germans tended to be taller than East Germans...