This work provides a critical reexamination of the origin and development of America's land-grant colleges and universities, created by the most important piece of legislation in higher education. The story is divided into five parts that provide closer examinations of representative developments.

1: Scientific and Social Foundations; Introduction; Institutionalizing Agricultural Research in the Early American Republic: An International Perspective; Creating Colleges of Science, Industry, and National Advancement: The Origins of the New England Land-Grant Colleges *; Educating the Toiling Peoples: Students at the Illinois Industrial University, Spring 1868; 2: The Politics of Launching Land-Grant Colleges, 1862-1890; Introduction; Saving the Land Grant for the Agricultural College of Pennsylvania; "An Elephant In The Hands of the State" * : Creating the Texas Land-Grant College; 3: Agriculture and Engineering, 1880-1900; Introduction; The Populist Vision for Land-Grant Universities, 1880-1900; Robert H. Thurston, Modern Engineering Education, and Its Diffusion through Land-Grant Universities; 4: Land-Grant Universities, 1900-1940; Introduction; President Edmund J. James and the University of Illinois, 1904-1920: Redeeming the Promise of the Morrill Land-Grant Act; Transforming the Land Grant: The University of New Hampshire and the Pennsylvania State University under the Leadership of Ralph Dorn Hetzel; 5: Universities and the Land-Grant Mission since 1930; Introduction; The Land-Grant Colleges, Cooperative Extension, and the New Deal; Social Science over Agriculture: Reimagining the Land-Grant Mission at the University of California-Irvine in the 1960s; Storying and Restorying the Land-Grant System