Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are United States statutes that allowed states to create land-grant colleges focused on agricultural and mechanical studies. The first act passed in 1862 during the American Civil War, and a second act followed in 1890 to expand the model.
President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act of 1862 into law on the 2nd of July 1862. It granted each state land scrip for 30,000 acres of public land for every representative and senator it had in Congress.
Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont introduced the bill, building on a land-grant plan championed by Illinois College professor Jonathan Baldwin Turner. Congress first considered it in 1857, passed it in 1859, and saw it vetoed by President James Buchanan before it finally became law in 1862.
Kansas State University was the first land-grant institution actually created under the Morrill Act of 1862, established in 1863. Iowa had been the first state to accept the act's terms, on the 12th of September 1862, funding its State Agricultural College and Model Farm.
The Morrill Act of 1890 required states to either admit students regardless of race or designate a separate land-grant institution for African Americans. Southern states chose separate institutions, which produced several of today's historically Black colleges and universities, though it also formalized segregated education.
The Morrill Act transformed American engineering education, moving training beyond the United States Military Academy's fortress-construction courses into the new land-grant colleges. By 1911 the United States was graduating about 3,000 engineers a year with 38,000 already in the workforce, versus roughly 1,800 a year in Germany, making the US a technical education leader within 50 years of the act's passage.