In the well-known Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925, famously portrayed in the film and play Inherit the Wind, William Jennings Bryan’s fundamentalist fervor clashed with defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s aggressive agnosticism, illustrating what current scholars call the conflict thesis. It appeared, regardless of the actual legal question of the trial, that Christianity and science were at war with each other. Decades later, a new generation of evangelical scientists struggled to restore peace. After the Monkey Trial is the compelling history of those evangelical scientists in Britain and America who, unlike their fundamentalist cousins, supported mainstream scientific conclusions of the world and resisted the anti-science impulses of the era. This book focuses on two organizations, the American Scientific Affiliation and the Research Scientists’ Christian Fellowship (today Christians in Science), who for more than six decades have worked to reshape the evangelical engagement with science and redefine what it means to be a creationist.

One of the most famous trials in U.S. history took place in a tiny town in Tennessee in 1925. Dayton was the site of what became known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. The defendant, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating a recently passed state law. This law made it illegal to teach the theory of evolution. Under most circumstances, few people would have paid any attention to the trial. Several of Dayton’s leading citizens saw a chance to put their town on the map. They were successful. Two of the country’s top lawyers—William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow—soon became involved. Dozens of reporters poured into Dayton from all over the country. It was the first trial to receive live media coverage. Scopes was found guilty. He had to pay a small fine. But the issues about evolution that the trial raised are still debated today.

This book introduces readers to the "Trial of the Century," revealing how the trial originated, what caused and happened during and after the trial, what happened to the trial's participants, and why the trial still matters nearly 100 years later. Ongoing controversies about school curricula, such as the teaching of Critical Race Theory and the role of parents in public education, can all be traced to the Scopes Trial. Today, the question remains: who controls the school curriculum? This was a foundational issue in the Scopes Trial, and we have been debating this question ever since. This book will help readers understand where these controversies originated and how courts, politicians, and the public handled these issues nearly a century ago. Featuring new information from previously untapped sources and providing an in-depth study of John Scopes himself, this book interrogates the facts, fictions, and legend of the Scopes Trial, which historians rank as one of the defining events of the 20th century. It is an ideal resource for anyone interested in the ongoing controversy about evolution, science, and religion in education and American life.

Colleges, universities, and seminaries do more than just transfer knowledge to students. They sell themselves as "experiences" that transform young people in unique ways. The conservative evangelical Protestant network of higher education has been no different. In the twentieth century, when higher education sometimes seemed to focus on sports, science, and social excess, conservative evangelical schools offered a compelling alternative. On their campuses, evangelicals debated what it meant to be a creationist, a Christian, a proper American, all within the bounds of Biblical revelation. Instead of encouraging greater personal freedom and deeper pluralist values, conservative evangelical schools thrived by imposing stricter rules on their students and faculty. In Fundamentalist U, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America's culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education. Students at these schools have been expected to learn what it means to be an educated evangelical in a secularizing society. This book asks new questions about that formative process. How have conservative evangelicals hoped to use higher education to instill a uniquely evangelical identity? How has this identity supported the continuing influence of a dissenting body of knowledge? In what ways has it been tied to cultural notions of proper race relations and proper relations between the sexes? And perhaps most important, how have students responded to schools' attempts to cultivate these vital notions about their selves? In order to understand either American higher education or American evangelicalism, we need to appreciate the role of this influential network of dissenting institutions. Only by making sense of these schools can we make sense of America's continuing culture wars.

The 1925 trial of John Scopes in tiny Dayton, Tennessee, remains a defining moment in American history. This "trial of the century"--a "media event" before the term was coined--addressed issues that still affect our society today, such as control of the school curriculum, the ongoing tensions between science and faith in public schools, and the ramifications of teaching evolution and human origins. This book is the first encyclopedic treatment of the Scopes Trial. The text draws on media reports, family interviews, and Scopes' personal correspondence, providing new information and perspectives. The book includes previously unseen photos and information about Scopes and his relatives, as well as insights about the trial's instigators, participants, and issues, all organized in a concise and easily accessible format.

This is the first comprehensive, annotated biography of John Scopes, the famed defendant in the Scopes Monkey Trial. This biography uses new, never-before-published sources, photographs, and stories from untapped sources-John Scopes's family and friends. In 1967, John Scopes published his memoirs, which focused overwhelmingly on his eight-day trial and not on the rest of his life, ignoring several important events, such as his divorce and remarriage, his run for the U.S. Congress, and his challenges with his family. This volume is the first complete, annotated biography of John Scopes. It details his entire life and, where appropriate, those of his parents, siblings, wife, and children, all supported by hundreds of cited sources, quotations, and family stories. Ideal for readers with an interest in academic freedom, free speech, or the evolution-creationism controversy, this book uncovers the facts of Scopes's post-trial life, including the challenges that Scopes faced in his personal life, his conversion from a socialist to a political conservative, and his final years and death. Readers will be surprised to learn that John Scopes's life differed significantly from what has often been presented in the media.

After the passage of the Butler Act, which made it unlawful for a state-funded school in Tennessee to teach that humans evolved from lower organisms, 24-year-old high school teacher John Scopes intentionally violated the law. Arrested and charged on May 5, 1925, Scopes became the centerpiece in a trial that pitted two of the finest legal minds of the time against one another. Prosecutor William Jennings Bryan's participation in the trial served as the capstone to his prior unsuccessful advocacy to cut off funds to schools that taught evolution. Prominent trial attorney Clarence Darrow, an agnostic, spoke for the defense. This case, which was the first to be broadcast via radio, was a critical turning point in the creation vs. evolution controversy that continues today. The Scopes Monkey Trial has since been fictionalized in a play, a film, and three television films, all called Inherit the Wind. The Scopes Monkey Trial: Debate over Evolution explains how this pivotal court case shaped the way evolution and creationism are approached in classrooms.

When Waylem, a small town in the Northern Midwest loses its thriving industry, drug kingpins start selling their wares and create a whole new market in what was once a bustling, happy home. Parents are desperate for work, and youth are desperate for relief. Some will stop at nothing to get it. One high school student loses everything he once loved, and one high school teacher finds himself in the middle of a terrifying lawsuit, all because the legitimate business moved out and the drug business moved in. Their whole lives are about to change in this story of the plotting, destruction, and redemption of those too far gone to know they were lost.

By the 1920s, the sectional reconciliation that had seemed achievable after Reconstruction was foundering, and the South was increasingly perceived and portrayed as impoverished, uneducated, and backward. In this interdisciplinary study, Angie Maxwell examines and connects three key twentieth-century moments in which the South was exposed to intense public criticism, identifying in white southerners' responses a pattern of defensiveness that shaped the region's political and cultural conservatism. Maxwell exposes the way the perception of regional inferiority confronted all types of southerners, focusing on the 1925 Scopes trial in Dayton, Tennessee, and the birth of the anti-evolution movement; the publication of I'll Take My Stand and the turn to New Criticism by the Southern Agrarians; and Virginia's campaign of Massive Resistance and Interposition in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Tracing the effects of media scrutiny and the ridicule that characterized national discourse in each of these cases, Maxwell reveals the reactionary responses that linked modern southern whiteness with anti-elitism, states' rights, fundamentalism, and majoritarianism.

The enormous amount of literature on the Scopes Trial focuses on the religious elements of the trial. It almost totally ignored the importance of racism as taught in the text that Scopes used to teach biology. Bryan was not concerned about evolution in general, but specifically human evolution. He believed that Darwin's theory, as applied to humans, encouraged the oppression of certain oppressed groups. Taking evolution's philosophy to its logical conclusion meant justifying "survival of the fittest" in social matters. This philosophy he learned from his extensive reading about WWI was a major factor influencing the Germans to fight in the first World War. Furthermore, Bryan believed the citizens of Tennessee had a right to determine what their children were taught in the public schools. Another fact that is rarely mentioned is the main fossil evidence cited in the trial documents, and the press, in support of human evolution has been discredited by evolutionists including Neanderthal man, Piltdown man, Java man, and Nebraska man. Scopes was not a biology teacher, but rather taught math. His college degree was not in biology, but law. He was not put on the stand to testify in his trial, probably because he never taught evolution and could not honestly answer questions about teaching it. This book covers the so-called trial of the century, telling the real story of a sham brought on by the ACLU to further their political and anti-Christian goals.