Xenophobia of the Past
Picture this unpleasant scenario: an American school group travels to foreign countries around the world, walking the streets of cities as diverse as Rome, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg, and Moscow. Their American tour guide does nothing but disparage every place they go. In one city, he speaks at length of high crime rates and […]
We’re All Muckrakers Now
Originally Published by The Imaginative Conservative. Today, Theodore Roosevelt prompts us to ask the same question he raised over a century ago in his speech “The Man with the Muck-Rake”: How do we devote our attention to society’s problems without allowing them to devour us? Our survival in the Information Age hinges upon on our […]
The Scopes Trial in American Memory
Master’s Thesis – North Carolina State University. The 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial, in which high school teacher John T. Scopes was prosecuted in Dayton, Tennessee for violating the state’s Butler Act forbidding the teaching of human evolution, has been called “the Trial of the Century.” Fundamentalist politician William Jennings Bryan and celebrity defense attorney Clarence […]
“Inherit the Truth”: Revising History at Dayton’s Scopes Trial Festival
Presented at the North Carolina Graduate Student History Conference (2012). On March 21, 1925, Tennessee governor Austin Peay signed into law a bill deeming it unlawful for any public school teacher “to teach any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that […]