Examines the height and weight of West Point Cadets in the 19th Century and finds that their height was declining in the Antebellum Period. Confirms earlier findings based on Union Army soldiers. Finds also that the cadets were quite underweight by modern standards.

This paper reviews recent literature using stature and weight as measures of human welfare with a particular interest in cliometric or historical research. We begin with an overview of anthropometric evidence of living standards and the new but fast-growing field of anthropometric history. This...

We analyze the first representative series of individual measurements of the height of Swiss conscripts for the years 1875–1950. We find that average height followed a general upward time trend, but the economic downturn in the 1880s slowed down the increase in rural average-heights while the...

Factors related to geography such as climate, natural resources or waterways often affect human activities. However, traditional approaches such as ordinary least squares (OLS) have limitations in investigating such patterns. Unlike OLS regression, geographically weighted regression (GWR) allows...

We examine spatial convergence in biological well-being in the Habsburg Monarchy, circa 1890-1910, on the basis of evidence of the physical stature of 21-year-old military recruits, disaggregated into 15 Districts. We find that the shorter the population in 1890, the faster its height grew...

This paper investigates the relationship between height and some measures of human welfare in Spain for the period 1850-1978. For that purpose, we employ several filtering methods to measure the correlation between variables such as first order differences, deterministic trends, the Hodrick and...

The trend of the height of Indian scouts in the U.S. Army born between ca. 1825 and 1875 is analyzed. Their average height of ca. 170 cm (67 in.) confirms that natives were tall compared to Europeans but were nearly the shortest among the rural populations in the New World. The trend in their...

The positive relationship between per capita availability of dairy products and average height found in historical studies (for instance in nineteenth century Bavaria, Prussia and France; Baten, 2009) does not necessarily indicate a causal relationship. Historical studies usually apply...

We develop a methodology to estimate underlying (continuous) population distributions from bin-aggregated sample data through the estimation of the parameters of mixtures of distributions that allow for maximal parametric flexibility. The statistical approach we develop enables comparisons of...

The decline in the physical stature of the American population for more than a generation beginning with the birth cohorts of the early 1830s was brought about by a diminution in nutritional intake in spite of robust growth in average incomes. This occurred at the onset of modern economic growth...