| Summary: | "A history of the origins and early years of the land-grant colleges of the northeastern United States. Land-grant colleges of this region were not "farm schools," and, indeed, were meant to offer a service distinct from the practical education most readily available to (and most often romanticized by later scholars) young men in rural America. The land-grant schools were premised on scientific education, high academic standards, and the training of professionals. Focusing on several newly created institutions, as well as some colleges of the Colonial and Early Republic eras that became land-grant schools, the book explores the social, political, and economic forces that propelled the land-grant movement in the Northeast states and the states of the Midwest where practical education predominated. These broad regional trends point toward a fundamental tension in the Morrill Act itself, which left implementation to the states. Mixing the promotion of science and middle-class professionalism while at the same time serving a population keel on marketable skills, paying jobs, and social equity (all encapsulated in the Grange Movement of the same era), land-grant colleges were fraught with ideological and practical difficulties. (This lack of a unified mission was further highlighted by questions of inclusion and role of women and African Americans.) These divisions are nowhere more present than in the land-grant colleges of the Northeast, and thus these institutions deserve special attention in a literature that has often associated the Morrill Act with the Grange Movement and focused on the institutions of the Midwest"--
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