One of the most sensational court cases in twentieth century America, the Scopes Monkey Trial went infinitely beyond the boundaries of law and the courtroom to question the social, intellectual, and cultural values of America. The explosive and passionate conflicts instigated by the arguments in the case of the State of Tennessee vs. public schoolteacher John T. Scopes in 1925 characterized the decade in which they took place. On one side stood those who emphasized secularism, science, new ideas and theories, and individual self-expression; on the other side stood religious dogma and traditionalism. Thus, there was a bitter division between those Americans who wanted change, and the many others who clung to repressive notions of conformity, moral purity, and order.

The battleground for this conflict between new and old ideas was the public school system within which John Scopes taught Darwin's Theory of Evolution, which...