During the nineteenth century the United States urbanized - the share of the population living in urban areas increased - and industrialized - the share of the labor force in manufacturing increased. Our survey of the literature and analyses of census data suggests that a key reason was the...

The consensus view among economic historians is that wage inequality in American manufacturing followed an inverted-U path from the early nineteenth century until just before World War Two. The previous literature, however, has been unable to fully document this path over time, or fully assess...

The long-standing view in US economic history is the shift in manufacturing in the nineteenth century from the artisan shop to the mechanized factory led to "labor deskilling." Craft workers were displaced by mix of semi-skilled operatives, unskilled workers, and a reduced force of mechanics to...

Examines the height of Georgian convicts and concludes that their height declined beginning with the birth cohorts of 1835. The economic transition brought about a decline in their nutritional status.

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.

During the nineteenth century, the US manufacturing sector shifted away from the "hand labor" mode of production, characteristic of artisan shops, to the "machine labor" of the factory. This was the focus of an extremely detailed but extraordinarily complex study by the Commissioner of Labor...

During the 1850s, land in U.S. farms surged by more than 100 million acres while almost 50 million acres of land were transformed from their raw, natural state into productive farmland. The time and expense of transforming this land into a productive resource represented a significant fraction...

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation...

Over the course of the nineteenth century manufacturing in the United States shifted from artisan shop to factory production. At the same time United States experienced a "transportation revolution", a key component of which was the building of extensive railroad network. Using a newly created...

We use establishment level data from the 1850-80 censuses of manufacturing to study the correlates of the use of steam power and the impact of steam power on labor productivity growth in nineteenth century American manufacturing. A key result is that establishment size mattered: large...