Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion - Softcover

"A riveting book."--Frank Rich, The New York Times

"Larson...incisively examines the myths surrounding the Scopes trial...The originality of his book arises in large part from its thoughtful, evenhanded treatment of both sides in the confrontation -- and the seriousness with which he takes the opposing convictions about religion, science, and their relationship to the law that clashed in Dayton."--Daniel Kevles, New York Review of Books

"Scholarly, informative...fair and meticulous...In some ways, America seems to be only just learning the truth of the Scopes trial and the implications of the debate over evolution. [Larson's] book is a crucial piece of the educational process."--First Things

"A stunning and well-documented narrative that places the trial in an historical, legal, religious, and scientific context, and then continues beyond to assess its impact on the tension between science and religion that persists right up to the present."--Quarterly Review of Biology

"Larson...is becoming one of the leading historians of his generation."--Gregg Easterbrook, Washington Monthly

A re-issue with a new preface, this is the 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning book. In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the unlikely setting for one of the 20th century's most contentious dramas: the Scopes trial and the debate over science, religion and their place in public education. The "trial of the century" not only cast Dayton into the national spotlight, it epitomized America's ongoing struggle between religious liberty and majority democracy. The "Monkey Trial", as it was nicknamed, was instigated by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge a controversial Tennessee law banning the teaching of human evolution in state 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. What resulted was a trial of mythic proportions.

Bryan joined the prosecutors, and the acclaimed criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow led the defence - a dramatic legal match that drew enormous media attention and later inspired the classic play Inherit the Wind. The Scopes trial was a watershed in America's discussion of science and religion, and marked the beginning of a battle that continues to this day in many states and cities across the country. Edward Larson's classic book on the trial, "Summer for the Gods", received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1998 and remains the single most authoritative account of a pivotal event whose combatants remain at odds in school districts and courtrooms throughout the country. For this edition, Larson has added a new preface that assesses the state of the battle between creationism and evolution, and points the way to how it might potentially be resolved.