Abstract: 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.

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.

Develops a robust statistical procedure to analyze the trend in height if the available samples are truncated at the minimum height requirement.

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.

Examines the height of Habsburg Soldiers in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and argues that the society was facing a Malthusian crisis, which induced the Monarch to enact many institutional changes in order to save the society from disaster. While living standards declined, the...