Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• ARNOLD-FORSTER, TOM

Titel

Rethinking the Scopes Trial: Cultural Conflict, Media Spectacle, and Circus Politics

Ist Teil von

• Journal of American studies, 2022-02, Vol.56 (1), p.142-166

Ort / Verlag

Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Literature Online (LION)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The Scopes trial has long been interpreted through claims about science and religion and about individual rights and liberties. This article recovers a different debate about the trial's political history that emerged in the later 1920s and resonated down the twentieth century. Here the trial figured as a fraught national circus, which raised difficult questions about the relationship between media spectacle and cultural conflict in the United States. The trial's circus dynamics intensified the conflicts it staged without ever actually resolving them; this trap was then perceived and negotiated in different ways by contemporary liberals, conservatives, socialists, and far-right activists.