I remember touring some colonial homes and looking at the beds and the clothes, etc. back when I was a boy. I was astounded at the smallness of what I saw. I’m wondering if the average size of Americans has grown overall.
I recently went through the Ronald Reagan Library. There are displays of the Reagan’s clothing. I thought...wow, Nancy was tiny!
I find that at most displays of anyone’s clothing they look really small to me. My Grandmother’s wedding dress looks like it was a child’s.
Yes.
Better nutrition leads to larger smarter people over all.
George Washington was 6' 2" which was a large man at the time. Now it is unremarkable.
And people in the Americas tended to be taller then people born and raised in Europe.
Some of that was genetics as American tended to have some American Indian in their background but a good deal of it was just that they ate a diet that was higher in calories and nutrients then the people in Europe.
Not just Americans, I think. We visited an 1850 Jesuit mission in Idaho that's still standing. The furniture was made for much smaller people…it almost felt like like a dollhouse -- and I'm only 5'3". The good French and Italian friars must have been about 4'8" tall.
http://www.visitidaho.org/attraction/parks/coeur-dalenes-old-mission-state-park/
Yeah, there was a big jump in height as malnutrition was stamped out back in the early 20th century. Men are on average about 4-5 inches taller than men in the 1800s.