When I began my master’s degree in history in 2016, I knew what I wanted to study. To me, the most important event in Western history is the economic revolution that occurred in Europe beginning about 1750—the Industrial Revolution. I was steeped in knowledge about its impact from reading books like The Rise of the Western World, How the West Grew Rich, The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism, and The Great Divergence.
Indeed, my master’s thesis concentrated on details of that revolution. But my history studies taught me much more. My academic adventure evolved into a struggle to understand why “change over time” (that’s how historians define history) occurs as it does. That is one of the reasons I created this blog: I was looking for a theory of history.
Land-grant colleges are state schools founded to teach “agricultural and mechanical arts.” Today, many are among the nation’s largest research universities. In this post I’ll share some thoughts about how they came about.
Let’s begin with conventional wisdom. Land-grant colleges “emerged from an idealistic concern for the adaptation of existing educational resources to a changing society . . . .” [1] Oddly, this somewhat grandiose explanation for the land-grants comes from John Simon, a historian who deftly investigated the politics behind the 1862 act that authorized such schools. He also recognized that the typical American didn’t have much truck with higher education in the mid-nineteenth century. One agricultural school was called the “Farmers’ High School” because the title “Farmers’ College” would sound too fancy.
