Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools

Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools

by Adam R. Shapiro
ISBN-10:
022602945X
ISBN-13:
9780226029450
Pub. Date:
05/21/2013
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
ISBN-10:
022602945X
ISBN-13:
9780226029450
Pub. Date:
05/21/2013
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools

Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools

by Adam R. Shapiro

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Overview

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes “monkey” trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment—and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the historical relationship of science and religion in America.
           
For the first time we see how religious objections to evolution became a prevailing concern to the American textbook industry even before the Scopes trial began. Shapiro explores both the development of biology textbooks leading up to the trial and the ways in which the textbook industry created new books and presented them as “responses” to the trial. Today, the controversy continues over textbook warning labels, making Shapiro’s study—particularly as it plays out in one of America’s most famous trials—an original contribution to a timely discussion.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780226029450
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Publication date: 05/21/2013
Pages: 200
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Adam R. Shapiro is a lecturer in intellectual and cultural history at Birkbeck, University of London.

Table of Contents

chapter one 1
Beyond Science and Religion: The Scopes Trial in Historical Context

chapter two
The Textbook Trust and State Adoption

chapter three
Textbooks and Their Makers: Authors, Editors, Salesmen, and Readers

chapter four
Civic Biology and the Origins of the Antievolution Movement

chapter five
How Scopes Was Framed

chapter six
The Evolution of the New Civic Biology

chapter seven
Biology Textbooks in an Era of Science and Religion

chapter eight
Losing the Word: Measuring the Impact of Scopes

Acknowledgments
Notes

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