On the sweltering morning of July 10, 1925, 200 newspaper reporters, newsreel film producers, and radio broadcasters flooded the county courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee. Hot dog vendors, preachers, and trained chimpanzees jammed the streets. The sleepy hamlet had transformed into a national spectacle almost overnight. 

The nation’s media had come to Dayton for the start of the trial of John Scopes, the local high school teacher accused of violating the state’s ban on teaching evolution. Crowds flocked to witness the famous orators William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow go to battle, in what was already being hailed as the “Trial of the Century.”

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