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Abstract
The Morrill Act of 1862 provided the funding mechanism for the modern land-grant college system. In the over 160 years since its passage, the tripartite land-grant mission of
teaching, research, and service has become the most recognizable legacy of the legislation.
Recent scholars of land-grant education caution against viewing the history of land-grant
education as a singular story. Despite this caution, many of the texts that offer horizontal
histories of land-grant education focus largely on schools in Northeastern and Midwestern states.
Within the study of the history of higher education, land-grant college development and the
development of higher education in the postbellum South are relatively underexamined. Southern
land-grant college development, where the two bodies of literature converge, is studied even less.
This study combines multicase study methodology and historical research methods to
examine the history of Alcorn University (now Alcorn State University), the University of
Georgia, and Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Polytechnic and State
University) between 1862 and 1910 to answer the question: How did land-grant colleges develop
in the postbellum South? In doing so, it looks both within the developments of these colleges, to
identify unique internal factors and external influences, and across them, to identify larger
themes around land-grant college development in the region. Specifically, this study explores
how state-level politics, race and racism, and the changing social order of the postbellum South
shaped these land-grant colleges during the eras of Reconstruction and Populism. This study
intervenes in the historiographies of land-grant college development and southern higher
education, and in doing so extends our understanding of both.