In their new book, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (Cambridge, 2008), Olmstead and Rhode offer a radically new interpretation of American agricultural development from the late 18th to early 20th century. While earlier scholars have ascribed a...

Quantitative economic history was once all the rage. But, until recently, any and all approaches to economic history seemed to be losing ground. The authors tell us why and whether economic history is now making a comeback.

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.

"Students need to understand how market demand for certain staple crops created plantations and the slave- and then indentured-labor system, and this book explains it. The third entry in the Cunliffe Series, it examines the cultivation of American tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton in the context...