Word: trialing
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...Tenn., has had a monkey on its back. That monkey is the English naturalist Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is being celebrated on Feb. 12 in hundreds of cities around the world. Darwin's treatise On the Origin of Species was instrumental to the town's famous 1925 Scopes trial, which pitted noted trial lawyers Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan against each other in a fight to determine whether evolution should be taught in Tennessee public schools. (Read TIME's original 1925 story on the Scopes "monkey trial...
...overwhelmingly Christian and conservative small town less than an hour's drive north of Chattanooga, Dayton landed the Scopes trial in 1925 after the American Civil Liberties Union announced a search for a teacher willing to challenge a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Town leaders, eager to boost the local economy with the media attention a trial would bring, came up with a 24-year-old science teacher named John Thomas Scopes, who was willing to teach Darwinist theory instead of creationism...
Once Scopes was indicted and the trial began in July, hundreds of newspaper reporters descended on the town to cover the circus-like event, which featured fully clothed chimpanzees performing on the courthouse lawn and a fair bit of ridicule from newspaper columnist H.L. Mencken, who declared that residents were little more than backward "yokels...
...think some outsiders still view us as a bunch of anti-intellectual monkeys," says Ann Bates, a lifelong resident whose grandfather owned the drugstore where locals dreamed up the plan to bring the trial to town...
Meanwhile, Davis, who has been the director of the town's annual Scopes Trial Week, says the festival will not take place this year. While some residents have wondered whether that's because of pressure from outside groups during this 200th anniversary year, Davis says it was more of a staffing issue. "Simply put, the people who played Darrow and Bryan decided to retire this year, and they were kind of the driving forces behind all this," Davis explains...