In the summer 1925, the run-down Appalachian town of Dayton, Tennessee, played host to one of the most famous trials in history, pitting the former Secretary of State and 3-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan against the notorious criminal defence lawyer Clarence Darrow over the question of whether a local schoolteacher would have to pay a fine. 

But how did they get to this point? This episode focuses on the rise of anti-evolution sentiment in the Early-20th-Century USA, that led to the passage of the Butler Act in Tennessee, banning public schools from teaching that humans evolved from apes.