Saturday, August 06, 2005

A liitle bit of fact-checking ...

Thanks to President Bush, evolution is back in the news. The President is being widely portrayed as the living embodiment of Matthew Harrison Brady, the caricature of William Jennings Bryan in Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's play Inherit the Wind, which is about the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial. Thanks to the Information Age we are blessed to be living in, it is possible to get a quick, factual overview of what actually took place in a Dayton, Tenn., courtroom in July 1925. Included are links to H.L. Mencken's columns and to much else besides. I thought it particularly interesting to learn that Bryan offered to pay the fine that court imposed on John Scopes.

2 comments:

  1. Last month the Smithsonian released some unpublished photos from the Scopes trial...

    http://www.siarchives.si.edu/research/scopes.html

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  2. Here's a link to those photos from the Smithsonian Archives. Thanks, Patrick. Note that I've linked to your magazine.

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