Episode 1: Monkey Business

In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher

from Dayton, Tennessee was put on trial for teaching evolution in what came to be called the monkey trial, a landmark in the history of doubt. All over the country, Americans tuned in on their radios as science and faith battled in the courtroom. But the nation also witnessed something else: the beginnings of a culture war that’s been waged ever since. This season on The Last Archive, a skeptical chronicle of an early battle in that war.

Image: Hulton Deutsch / Corbis Historical via Getty Images

KEY SOURCES

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion by Edward Larson.

Journalist H.L. Mencken's Account of the Scopes Trial in the Baltimore Sun (here & here).

Footage of the Scopes Trial.

The Menace of Darwinism by William Jennings Bryan.

The Clarence Darrow Collection is hosted by the University of Minnesota, and includes trial documents and transcripts.

Watch Inherit the Wind, the 1960 film about the trial.

American Inquisitors: a Commentary on Dayton and Chicago by Walter Lippmann.