A volume of well-crafted essays that consider the federal government's first foray into higher education by examining engineering education at the nation's land-grant universities over the past 140 years. The authors demonstrate how that history has framed the present and suggest how it is likely to influence the fashioning of the future. The expert contributors, all of whom have studied and written prominently on the history of engineering education, concentrate on revealing the critical trends and major events of this 140-year history.