Scandinavians in Chicago: The Origins of White Privilege in Modern America

Agricultural and Mechanical Arts (University of Maine) had fewer elites and, thus, its male students exhibited less “anti-coedism” (164). Women carved out their own spaces, especially (but not exclusively) in departments of home economics. Although women faced considerable discrimination and did not enjoy the same opportunities as men, Sorber astutely argues that many female students sought education for their own purposes, including intellectual fulfillment. A compelling undercurrent in this volume is the continuing influence of German universities on American higher education. Historians have long been familiar with the story of the first Americans to earn doctorates, who decamped to post-Napoleonic Central Europe circa 1815. Sorber, though, shows how University of G€ottingentrained chemists and physicists became teachers and leaders at land-grant colleges like Rhode Island’s, whose president, John Washburn, had earned his doctorate in chemistry from G€ottingen and subsequently brought many other German-trained faculty to the new institution at Kingston, Rhode Island. Traditionally, historians of the land-grant movement have focused on Midwestern institutions such as Iowa State University or Michigan State University; a standard history is Earl D. Ross’s classic Democracy’s College: The Land-Grant Movement in the Formative Stage (Iowa State College Press 1942). As Sorber’s thoughtful study indicates, however, the story of the land-grant colleges is too complex to use the concept of “democracy” to draw a straight line from the 1850s to the Morrill Act institutions of the twenty-first century. The “land-grant movement was forged not through a shared vision of democratic higher education but instead through a pragmatic accommodation of opposing class interests” (175). This is a necessary corrective. Sorber’s volume is somewhat similar to Scott M. Gelber’s The University and the People: Envisioning American Higher Education in an Era of Populist Protest (University of Wisconsin Press 2011), which shows how Populists in the South and West—especially Kansas, Nebraska, and North Carolina—reinvented and reshaped land-grant institutions in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Both Sorber’s and Gelber’s books are essential reading for understanding the long and complex story of the Morrill Acts and the institutions they founded. Sorber’s research includes primary and secondary publications relating to land-grant institutions of the Northeast, as well as archival research at Cornell, Maine, Vermont, and other institutions. Because Sorber focuses on the Northeast, some familiar pieces of the story are missing. Although the old chestnut that Illinois’s Jonathan Baldwin Turner influenced Justin Smith Morrill and the 1862 law is overblown, it is surprising to see Turner barely mentioned at all, and then only in passing (53). Also, as an antecedent to the land-grant movement, it is difficult to overlook the manual labor schools common in the antebellum Northeast and Midwest. Furthermore, although Sorber briefly discusses the Morrill Act of 1890, the segregated land-grant institutions created in the turn-of-the-century South are beyond this book’s scope. Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt: The Origins of the Morrill Act and the Reform of Higher Education is a well-researched and well-written book that all historians interested in the history of American higher education or late-1800s populist movements should read. Hopefully, Sorber’s meticulous research will prompt more historians to explore the impact and implementation of the Morrill Act in various regions of the United States and to synthesize the resulting story. After all, regions reacted in diverse ways to the idea of governmentfunded agricultural and mechanical education, and the movement itself shifted over time. Students of American history should know this story in all its complexity and regional idiosyncrasy.