Morrill Act

The 1862 act granting each American state federal land to endow colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts. The land-grant universities it created, extended to Black institutions by the second act of 1890, invented the model of teaching, research and county extension that carried science onto working farms, a model copied worldwide and the institutional soil most figures in this atlas grew from. The land granted was largely taken from Indigenous nations, a fact the modern accounting of the system includes. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/