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Title: Summer for the Gods

Subtitle: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion

Author: Edward J. Larson

Narrator: Brian Troxell

Format: Unabridged

Length: 10 hrs and 48 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-03-17

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

In the summer of 1925, the sleepy hamlet of Dayton, Tennessee, became the setting for one of the 20th century's most contentious dramas: the Scopes trial that pit William Jennings Bryan and the anti-Darwinists against a teacher named John Scopes into a famous debate over science, religion, and their place in public education.

That trial marked the start of a battle that continues to this day - in Dover, Pennsylvania; Kansas; Cobb County, Georgia; and many other cities and states throughout the country. Edward Larson's classic, Summer for the Gods, received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1998 and is the single most authoritative account of a pivotal event whose combatants remain at odds in school districts and courtrooms. 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.

Members Reviews:

A Great History of the Scopes Monkey Trial & Evolutionary Thought in America!

In âSummer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and Americaâs Continuing Debate Over Science and Religionâ, Edward J. Larson writes, âDuring the first quarter of the twentieth century, scientists in western Europe and the United States accumulated an increasingly persuasive body of evidence supporting a Darwinian view of human origins, and the American people began to take notice. These scientific developments helped set the stage in the early 1920s for a massive crusade by fundamentalists against teaching evolution in public schools, which culminated in the 1925 trial of John Scopesâ (pg. 14). Of the ACLU involvement, Larson writes, âAlready the three main tactics for attacking the antievolution measure had emerged: the defense of individual freedom, an appeal to scientific authority, and a mocking ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical literalism; later, they became the three prongs of the Scopes defenseâ (pg. 53).

Discussing the Tennessee law and the anticipated media circus, Larson writes, âThose proud of their stateâs antievolution statute feared that the upcoming trial would discredit it and Tennessee; those embarrassed by it feared that the upcoming trial would heap further ridicule on their stateâ (pg. 94). Further, âIn a stroke, the ACLU lost control of what it initially conceived as a narrow constitutional test of the statute. With Bryan on hand, evolution would be on trial at Dayton, and pleas for individual liberty would run headlong into calls for majority ruleâ (pg. 100). Discussing race, Larson writes, âRelatively little comment about the trial survives from African AmericansâIn any event, the outcome would not affect African Americans, because Tennessee public schools enforced strict racial segregation and offered little to black students beyond elementary instructionâ (pg. 122). In terms of legal strategy, Larson writes, âThe prosecution maintained that the statute outlawed any teaching about human evolution regardless of what evolution meant of whether it conflicted with the Bible. This position rendered evidence on those questions irrelevant. The defense countered that the law only barred instruction in evolution that denied the biblical account of creation, and therefore such evidence was irrelevant.