Reviews the evidence on early-industrial height cycles and shows why the economic transition put downward pressure on the nutritional status of the European and American populations.

The discovery of the New World enabled the nutritional status of the European populations to be maintained sufficiently to avoid a major Malthusian catastrophe as in prior centuries.

Reviews the evidence on early-industrial height cycles and shows why the economic transition put downward pressure on the nutritional status of the European and American populations.

Functional disability (difficulty in walking , difficulty in bending, paralysis, blindness in at least one eye, and deafness in at least one ear) in the United States has fallen at an average annual rate of 0.6 percent among men age 50 to 74 from the early twentieth century to the early 1990s....

The Great Migration–the massive migration of African Americans out of the rural South to largely urban locations in the North, Midwest, and West–was a landmark event in US history. Our paper shows that this migration increased mortality of African Americans born in the early twentieth...

Tuberculosis remains a major cause of international mortality, and researchers and policy advocates continue to seek a cost effective prevention and treatment. To better understand the current dilemma, this paper considers the physical and material environments associated with 19th century US...

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...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in the economic history literature. Moreover, a number of core findings in this literature are widely agreed upon. There are still some populations, places, and times, however, for which anthropometric evidence...

The use of height data to measure living standards is now a well-established method in economic history. Moreover, a number of core findings in the literature are widely agreed upon. There are still some populations, places, and times, however, for which anthropometric evidence remains thin. One...