Keeping the Faith

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A magnificent history of the 1925 Scopes trial and how the teaching of evolution in public schools exposed profound divisions in America that still resonate today–freedom, censorship, religion, and the meaning of democracy–by the award-winning author of The Impeachers

In 1925, hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the “trial of the century,” where a young schoolteacher named John T. Scopes was charged with teaching evolution to his biology class. Darwin’s theory that species evolved over time through natural selection (misunderstood to suggest that humans descended from monkeys) was viewed as a threat to the nation. Two legendary attorneys, Clarence Darrow for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution, drew massive crowds in a trial that quickly became a circus-like media sensation—but it was much more than that. Darrow was arguing that people should be free to worship, or not to worship, and be free to learn, particularly about science, while Bryan declared that evolution undermined the literal truth of the Bible and created a society without morals, meaning, or hope.

Prize-winning historian Brenda Wineapple brings to vivid life the entirety of this dramatic and colorful period that exposed foundational divisions across race, region, and religion, as factions used the courts as tools to buoy up their own ideologies. Bryan, three times the Democratic nominee for President, had been Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, and his populism and political ambitions, vividly chronicled in this book, culminated in Dayton. Darrow was the celebrated and successful advocate of labor and a fervent believer in civil rights, as protected by the Constitution. Along with the newly-formed ACLU, he defended Scopes, declaring, “No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry, and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.”

In Keeping the Faith, Brenda Wineapple illuminates this electrifying, pivotal legal showdown, which at its heart was a struggle over the fundamental values that define America, and in doing so calls attention to a crisis almost a century ago that continues to reverberate in the present.Brenda Wineapple is the author of seven books including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation, selected by a New York Times book critic as one of the ten best nonfiction works of 2019; Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877, a New York Times ‘Notable Book’; and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting, and a Pushcart Prize, she has also received three National Endowment Fellowships including its Public Scholars Award. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2023, she was selected a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.US

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