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Volume 26 of Research in Economic History includes six papers, evenly divided between European and North American topics. Beginning with the European topics, we have two data intensive papers and a survey/synthesis. Stefano Fenoaltea and Carlo Ciccarelli provide new estimates of social overhead investment in the different regions of Italy. This is followed by Markus Lampe's paper reporting data on bilateral trade flows in Europe between 1857 and 1875. The third contribution on a European topic is Bernard Harris's survey of the literature on gender, health, and welfare in England and Wales since industrialization.

This study utilizes a different approach to examine the effect of transportation on the average height of people in the postbellum period, simply by modeling the change in the marketable surplus of protein. The results show that railroad development had a positive effect on average height from 1867 to 1887, and after this period, its effect was negligible. This study suggests that the factors with negative effects – such as urbanization, industrialization, and infectious diseases – dominated the positive effects of railroad development leading actual average height to decrease from 1867 to 1887.

Research in Economic History, Volume 25, includes six chapters covering a range of geographic areas and tackling a range of issues in economic history. The first two address United States topics, one analyzing data from the eighteenth and the other from the twentieth century. Both have a macroeconomic focus. Peter Mancall, Josh Rosenbloom, and Tom Weiss consider growth in colonial America, while Gary Richardson examines the role of bank failures in propagating the Great Depression.

Research in Economic History volume 24 includes seven papers, four of which were submitted and evaluated through our regular channels. An additional three were solicited from among those presented at the conference Toward a Global History of Prices and Wages, held in Utrecht in August 2004. Owing to the emphasis in these papers on data and the relevance of their findings for our understanding of long-run economic growth and development in different parts of the world, we encouraged a number of authors from this conference to submit their work. Three of these contributions have already been published in REH 23, and an additional three are included here. Associate editor Greg Clark took responsibility for soliciting, refereeing, selecting, and editing the submissions.