On July 21, 1925, Tennessee schoolteacher John Scopes was found guilty of teaching evolution and fined $100, perhaps the lowest price ever paid by any martyr for any cause.
Historically, the "Monkey Trial" of 1925 has been often used to pit science and religion against one another. Less understood is how much this trial represented the divisions in American society between rural and urban cultures, academia and the working classes, populists and elitists, conservatives and progressives, and North and South. And perhaps the biggest question at all posed by the trial is whether or not majority opinion is sufficent to define truth. None of these intricacies, by the way, are adequately or fairly explored in that lousy piece of big-city elitist propaganda known as Inherit the Wind.
(Longtime readers of this blog will recall that a couple of years back, I posted a six-part series on the historiography of this infamous event. Fun stuff.)
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