Booktopia has been placed into Voluntary Administration. Orders have been temporarily suspended, whilst the process for the recapitalisation of Booktopia and/or sale of its business is completed, following which services may be re-established. All enquiries from creditors, including customers with outstanding gift cards and orders and placed prior to 3 July 2024, please visit https://www.mcgrathnicol.com/creditors/booktopia-group/

Summer for the Gods

Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

By: Edward J Larson

Write A Review

eBook | 16 June 2020

At a Glance

ePUB
352 Pages

Edition Type
Digital original

eBook

$27.99

Instant Digital Delivery to your Booktopia Reader App

The Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial and the battle over evolution and creation in America's schools.

In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the twentieth century’s most contentious courtroom dramas, pitting William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes, represented by Clarence Darrow and the ACLU, in a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education. That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day — in cities and states throughout the country.

Edward Larson’s classic Summer of the Gods — winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History — is the single most authoritative account of this pivotal event. The ‘Monkey Trial,’ as it was playfully nicknamed, was instigated by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge a controversial Tennessee law banning the teaching of human evolution in public schools. The Tennessee statute represented the first major victory for an intense national campaign against Darwinism, launched in the 1920s by Protestant fundamentalists and led by the famed politician and orator William Jennings Bryan. At the behest of the ACLU, a teacher named John Scopes agreed to challenge the statute, and what resulted was a trial of mythic proportions. Bryan joined the prosecutors and acclaimed criminal attorney Clarence Darrow led the defense — a dramatic legal matchup that spurred enormous media attention and later inspired the classic play Inherit the Wind.

Now with a new epilogue assessing the resonance of this history in America today, Summer of the Gods is the authoritative examination of the Scopes trial and its religious, cultural, educational, and political legacies.

About the Author

Edward J. Larson is Hugh & Hazel Darling Professor of Law at Pepperdine University School of Law.

Industry Reviews

"'The most widely publicized misdemeanor case in American history.' That is Edward J. Larson's description of the "monkey trial" in his 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. With that debate again at a rolling boil, that book by Larson, professor of history and law at the University of Georgia, demonstrates that the trial pitted a modernism with unpleasant dimensions against a religious fundamentalism that believed, not without reason, that it was faithful to progressive values."
Newsweek

"A gripping narrative."
Books & Culture

"A marvelous remake of the drama in Dayton. Summer for the Gods accomplishes the extraordinary feat of teaching us a good deal that is new about the trial and its significance, including the behind-the-scenes strategizing of the lawyers, the civil liberties stakes in the outcome, and the realities of its impact on the teaching of evolution in the United States."
Daniel J. Kevles, author of The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America