The Monkey Trial

In the summer of 1925, history was made in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. The issue at hand was the "Butler Law," which forbid the teaching of evolution in public schools. The fledgling American Civil Liberties Union wanted to challenge the law's constitutionality and chose to test it with the trial of John Scopes, a young high-school math and gym teacher who briefly taught Darwinism as a substitute biology teacher. The quiet procedural matter exploded into a media carnival when two great lawyers arrived to argue the case.