Famous Trials By Professor Douglas O. Linder
Home
Scopes “Monkey” Trial (1925)
The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South.
Who would dominate American culture–the modernists or the traditionalists? Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925. There a jury was to decide the fate of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The guilt or innocence of John Scopes, and even the constitutionality of Tennessee’s anti-evolution statute, mattered little. The meaning of the trial emerged through its interpretation as a conflict of social and intellectual values… Continued
Home Trial Account
OTHER RESOURCES
State v. John Scopes (“The Monkey Trial”): An Account
The Evolution-Creationism Controversy: Chronology
Tennessee Evolution Statutes
Genesis Stories
State v. Scopes: Trial Excerpts
Impressions of the Scopes Trial by Marcet Haldeman-Julius
H.L. Mencken’s Reports from the Scopes Trial
Biographies of Key Figures in the Scopes Trial and the Evolution Controversy
Hunter’s Civic Biology
Dayton,Tennessee
Images from the Scopes Trial
Appellate Court Decisions
Scopes Trial Satire: Satirical Reports by the Staff of The Onion
Evolution Controversy: Selected Essays on Eugenics, The Rise of Fundamentalism, the Vatican and Evolution, and the Supreme Court’s Treatment of the Evolution Issue
What is THE Trial of the Century?
Notes on Inherit the Wind
A Defense Expert’s Impressions of the Scopes Trial
Reflections–Forty Years After (by John Scopes)
Hell and the High Schools by T. T. Martin
Film Footage from the Scopes “Monkey” Trial
The Student Witnesses in the Scopes Trial
Scopes Trial : Links & Bibliography
Powered by UMKC School of Law
Copyright © 1995 – 2022 Professor Douglas O. Linder
To Top