Join us for a conversation with acclaimed historian Brenda Wineapple about her new examination of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation (Aug. 2024).

“No subject possesses the minds of men like religious bigotry and hate, and these fires are being lighted today in America.”

So said legendary attorney Clarence Darrow in 1925 as hundreds of people descended on the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, for the trial of schoolteacher John T. Scopes, who was charged with breaking the law by teaching evolution to his biology class in a public school.

Brenda Wineapple, the award-winning author of The Impeachers, explores how and why the Scopes trial quickly seemed a circus-like media sensation, drawing massive crowds and worldwide attention. Darrow, a brilliant and controversial lawyer, said in his electrifying defense of Scopes that people should be free to think, worship, and learn. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic nominee for president, argued for the prosecution that evolution undermined the fundamental, literal truth of the Bible and created a society without morals, meaning, and hope.

In Keeping the Faith, Wineapple takes us into the early years of the twentieth century—years of racism, intolerance, and world war — to illuminate, through this pivotal legal showdown, a seismic period in American history. At its heart, the Scopes trial dramatized conflicts over many of the fundamental values that define America, and that continue to divide Americans today.

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Cosponsored by the New York State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education, the New York State Museum, UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice’s “Justice and Multiculturalism in the 21st Century Project”, and The518.com