The Scopes Trial at 100: Secularism, Race, and Education

The Scopes Trial of 1925 was an inflection point in US conversations around religion, science, education, and mass media. A century later, core issues surfaced by the Scopes Trial are still with us — disputes about school curricula, the trustworthiness of bioscience, and secularism — making the Scopes Trial look like an early salvo in our ongoing culture wars. This symposium will feature some of the most cutting-edge scholars linking the Scopes Trial to our present moment one hundred years later.

Online access to the symposium will be limited to Friday’s sessions only.

A selection of relevant materials, including multiple lifetime editions of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, will be on display in the Henry Charles Lea Library during the symposium.

Co-sponsored by the Religious Studies Department Boardman Fund; Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts; Education, Culture, and Society Program at the Graduate School of Education; University Research Foundation; School of Arts and Sciences; Department of History; Department of History and Sociology of Science; and SNF Paideia Program.

Speakers:

Adam Laats, Edward J. Larson, Charles McCrary, Myrna Perez,  Shantá R. Robinson, and Adam Shapiro