A population’s average stature reflects its cumulative net nutrition and provides important insight when more traditional measures for economic well-being are scarce or unreliable. Heights on the U.S. Central Plains did not exhibit the antebellum paradox instantiated in the eastern urban areas; they increased markedly during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, becoming the tallest in the world. Whites were taller than blacks on the Central Plains where slavery was not the primary source of labor, but whites were also taller than blacks in the American South where it was. Immigrants from industrialized Europe were shorter than black and white Americans but taller than Latin Americans and Asians.

Body mass index ( bmi ) values reflect the net balance between nutrition, work effort, and calories consumed to fight disease. Nineteenth-century prison records in the United States demonstrate that the bmi values of blacks and whites were distributed symmetrically; neither underweight nor obese individuals were common among the working class. bmi values declined throughout the nineteenth century. By modern standards, however, nineteenth-century bmi s were in healthy weight ranges, though the biological living standards in rural areas exceeded those in urban areas. The increase in bmi s during the twentieth century did not have its origin in the nineteenth century.

Data taken from nineteenth-century American prison records reveal that the statures of Mexicans born in Mexico declined, whereas the statures of Mexicans born in the United States increased. The body mass indexes of both Mexicans born in Mexico and in the United States, however, remained approximately constant throughout the nineteenth century. The evidence suggests that even though the two groups shared a common background, their biological living conditions differed markedly.

Anthropometric data from American prisons reveal that the stature of Chinese immigrants to the American West compared favorably to that of other Chinese of the period for whom documentation exists. Year of birth was more significant than socioeconomic status in explaining variations in Chinese immigrants' height, indicating that political and economic events were primary factors in the decline of their stature as the century progressed.

Nineteenth-century European immigrants bound for America's Great Basin evinced considerable variation in occupational mobility. White-collar and skilled workers frequently abandoned their European human capital to work in agriculture, and European planters remained farmers. Unskilled laborers who entered agriculture in the Great Basin, however, experienced substantial up-ward occupational mobility from their original economic status.