Abstracts of Papers Presented at the Annual Meeting
回顾了过去25年关于美国内战前身高下降与人均收入增长矛盾的“战前谜题”研究，梳理了主要解释假说，适合经济史学者判断是否阅读原文。
A Quarter-Century of Research on the Antebellum Puzzle Cliometric research on the history of human physical stature began in the mid-1970s. The intention was-simply put-to use height as a proxy for per capita income and shed light on the living standards of populations going back to the eighteenth century. The research immediately discovered some reassuring patterns that made sense in the light of the working hypothesis: Americans were much taller than Europeans, urban populations were shorter than rural ones, and so forth. However, some important exceptions also began to surface: heights decreased beginning with the birth cohorts of the mid-1830s in the United States at a time when real per capita income was increasing significantly during the decades prior to the Civil War. The anomaly was discovered by Margo and Steckel in the early 1980s and first published in 1983. Subsequently christened the "Antebellum Puzzle," the finding posed quite a challenge to the working hypothesis without a convincing explanation. Hence, the anomaly, as often happens in scholarly discourse-spawned a veritable literature in order to understand its many facets. The major contenders for an explanation were that the disease environment deteriorated substantially due to urbanization and that the economic processes separated producers and consumers of food during the onset of modern economic growth which meant that prices of food increased faster than income and moreover, farm-gate prices increased even faster than recorded urban prices. The goal of this paper is to outline the development of this research agenda during the course of the last quarter-century.