Explore Libraries’ Scopes Trial Exhibit, Part of UT year-long commemoration
An exhibit of archival collections related to the Scopes “Monkey Trial” will open in the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives on the first day of Spring Semester, January 21. The exhibit is part of UT’s year-long commemoration of that early 20th-century media spectacle that drew crowds to a small town in East Tennessee.
In July 1925 radios across America were tuned to a courtroom drama unfolding in Dayton, Tennessee. The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes was a test of the Butler Act, which made it illegal for Tennessee’s public schools “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals.”
High school teacher John Thomas Scopes agreed to stand as defendant in a test case of the new anti-evolution law. Three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan argued for the prosecution, and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Clarence Darrow served as defense attorney for Scopes. The trial drew national media coverage.
The exhibit in the Special Collections Reading Room, 121 Hodges Library, will feature archival materials from Special Collections including a first edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and an edition of On the Origin of Species of Man. Original documents, published materials, and ephemeral items exploring the trial proceedings and the surrounding media coverage will be on view, in addition to a selection of evolutionary and creationist texts, both from the rare book collections and on loan from Alumni Distinguished Service Professor Gordon Burghardt. Other items on display include original playbills from campus productions of Inherit the Wind and an original script from the New York production. The exhibit will be accompanied by a digital exhibit of trial photographs and a research guide describing related materials in Special Collections.
The university’s Scopes Trial Centennial commemorates the event of a hundred years ago and addresses issues relating to religion and science that arouse controversy even to this day. Centennial events include a Clarence Brown Theatre production of Inherit the Wind and a presentation by Ed Larson, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Scopes Trial. Hodges Library is also hosting an exhibit of photos by UT’s Naturalists’ Club in the Dixie Marie Wooten Commons West (outside Starbucks).
