A century ago in Dayton, Tennessee, sensation-loving journalists of the 1920s transformed a small-town misdemeanor trial, brought under a new state law against teaching the theory of evolution in public schools, into a legendary clash of worldviews pitting populist orator, politician William Jennings Bryan and libertarian secularist, attorney Clarence Darrow. Over the ensuing years, fact and fiction blurred into the mythical version of the Tennessee Monkey Trial celebrated in bestselling books, Broadway plays, and Hollywood movies. In his lecture, Pulitzer Prize winning historian Edward Larson separates history from folklore in relating the story of the Scopes trial then and thereafter.

Ed Larson holds the Darling Chair in Law and is a University Professor of History at Pepperdine University. Recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History, Larson served as Associate Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives and taught for twenty years at the University of Georgia, where he chaired the history department. The author of fifteen books and over eighty published articles, his books include A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800; Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory; the Pulitzer Prize winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion, and the New York Times bestsellers, The Return of George Washington, 1783-1789 and Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership. Larson recently published, American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795. Larson has served as a visiting professor at Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, the University of Melbourne, Leiden University, and the University of Richmond.