Although the principles of refrigeration have been understood for thousands of years, the widespread use of mechanical refrigeration in the processing, shipping, and storing of perishable commodities began only in the 1890s. Because refrigeration facilitated the hygienic handling and storage of perishables, it promoted output growth, consumption, and nutrition through the spatial and temporal integration of markets for perishables. We estimate the impact of mechanical refrigeration on output and consumption, and hence on human nutrition, concentrating on the contribution from refrigerated dairy products, an important source of nutrients, particularly proteins and calcium. We conclude that the adoption of refrigeration in the late-nineteenth-century United States increased dairy consumption by 1.7% and overall protein intake by 1.25% annually after the 1890s. The increase in protein consumption was particularly important to the growth of the human organism. According to our lower-bound estimates, refrigeration directly contributed at least 5.1% of the increase in adult stature of the postrefrigeration cohorts, and combined with the indirect effects associated with improvements in the quality of nutrients and the reduction in illness, the overall impact was considerably larger.

The United States is a country in which the working classes are not well organized to participate in politics and the workplace. Four theoretical approaches encompass most explanations. They are culture and identity theories, convergence theories, centerperiphery theories, and institutional theories. Focusing on one specific case, the state of Texas, this article suggests that each approach can contribute to a political construction approach to the labor field that can better explain the patterns of organization. In Texas today working-class participation is very low, but 30 years ago union membership and voting were increasing; 100 years ago Texas was a fount of populism. A focus on the specific historical contexts of labor-management relations enables us to penetrate the contemporary post-facto image of Texas as one member of a category of conservative or nonunion states in contrast to liberal or union-friendly states. That binary image elides the actual more complex and diverse histories of labor struggles that constitute each side of this symbolic opposition. This article demonstrates that there is a real problem to investigate and suggests how we should think about it. What will become clear is that Texas is not exceptional when it comes to the status of workers in the polity. The specific historical pathways to the present suggest the significance of political struggles and ideological debate for the creation of a working class with influence and power.

Historical mortality analysis is often confounded by changing disease environments, diagnostic criteria, and terminology. Recorded causes of death are shaped by these local and historical contexts. We analyze changing literal causes of death during the shift from miasmatic to germ theories of disease using death records from two Massachusetts towns for selected years spanning 1850 to 1912. This analysis demonstrates that (1) International Classification of Diseases (ICD) classifications are more stable, yet potentially less informative, than the literal causes recorded in death accounts, (2) recorded causes of death often include additional qualifications and elaborations beyond basic literal causes of death, and the use of such qualifiers rose dramatically during the late nineteenth century, (3) social biases are clearly evident in the extent to which causes of death were further described or qualified, and (4) the additional descriptive qualification of deaths during this period of often ambiguous historical causes of death can potentially aid in efforts to classify causes of death and derive robust estimates of cause-specific mortality trends.

This article examines declining adult human stature in the nineteenth century in three countries: the United States, England, and the Netherlands. While this was not unprecedented, these three relatively important nations did experience a deterioration in the biological standard of living at a time when economic development was proceeding at a goodly pace. England and the Netherlands were among the most urbanized countries in Europe at the time, while the United States was still predominantly rural and agrarian. The essay argues that a confluence of circumstances contributed to the worsening of the physical condition of these populations even while real income per capita was growing. Among the factors involved were rapid urbanization without adequate public health and sanitation; a transport revolution and related commercialization, which brought people and goods into much closer contact; the consequent integration of disease environments, both within and across nations; and a growing dependence of the working populations on wage income along with a probable growing inequality in wealth and income, exacerbating the impact of fluctuations in food prices. Technological change had an impact on these events by lowering the relative prices of industrial goods. While the term Malthusian crisis (i.e., a shortage of subsistence followed by a rise in mortality) seems inappropriate in these cases, a similar process may have been taking place. It suggests that such a crisis may not commence with an increase in mortality but rather with an adjustment of the human organism to new nutritional circumstances.

Looking back at the more than 20 years that have gone by since the 1982 special issue of Social Science History, it is interesting to observe how important the study of anthropometric data has been in contributing to economic history and related disciplines.While there had been numerous earlier comments by contemporary observers as well as by scholars about heights and their implications as seen in JamesTanner's marvelous study, A History of the Study of Human Growth (1981), the systematic work that was reflected in the 1982 volume was then only about six or seven years old in the United States. It represented the early output of a study directed by Robert Fogel, primarily through the Development of the American Economy (DAE) project of the National Bureau of Economic Research.There had been a few previous publications including my own piece in Local Population Studies (Engerman 1976). My first use of the height-by-age data was in response to a dinnerparty conversation in 1974 with two ofmy colleagues in the Rochester history department:Herbert Gutman and Christopher Lasch.

During the so-called long delay of Argentine economic development, the northwest region experienced a sustained improvement in its health and nutrition status, as indicated by new evidence on heights. Within the region, there was internal convergence in average stature: differences in heights grew smaller over time between the provinces of Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, Catamarca, Salta, and Jujuy. In relation to Buenos Aires, the northwest region did not converge. Within the region, differences in skills, education, and social standing translated into important differences in stature. These differences tended to increase over time. Factors believed to be crucial for the economic growth and welfare of the region (such as the development of the sugar industry and the inflow of Bolivian immigrants) do not seem to have affected the long-term growth in stature.