The Scopes Monkey Trial Was Staged - July 21, 1925

The 1925 Scopes "Monkey Trial" is remembered as a clean fight between science and faith, but it began as a publicity stunt to save a dying Tennessee town, and the schoolbook at its center preached eugenics, the legend later erased. This episode holds the harder story: a teacher who agreed to be arrested, a progressive icon wrong about biology yet right about the danger in the book, and a myth that outlasted the truth. What survived was the version easiest to tell, not the one that happened in the room.