The Scopes Trial of 1925 was an inflection point in US conversations around religion, science, education, and mass media. A century later, core issues surfaced by the Scopes Trial are still with us—disputes about school curricula, the trustworthiness of bioscience, and secularism— making the Scopes Trial look like an early salvo in our ongoing culture wars. This symposium at the University of Pennsylvania will feature some of the most cutting-edge scholars linking the Scopes Trial to our present moment one hundred years later.

A selection of relevant materials, including multiple lifetime editions of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, will be on display in the Henry Charles Lea Library during the symposium.

Image credit: Cartoon from the July 14, 1925 Los Angeles Times newspaper.