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Famous
                            Trials: The John Scopes Trial 1925 (The
                            Monkey Trial)

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan during the trial 
The Scopes Trial: An Introduction
by  Douglas Linder (c) 2008

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....[CONTINUED]

 
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