Description: Back row, left to right: Horatio Hackett Newman, Maynard Mayo Metcalf, Fay-Cooper Cole, Jacob Goodale Lipman; Front row, left to right: Winterton Conway Curtis, Wilbur A. Nelson, William Marion Goldsmith. The Defense Mansion was a Victorian house where the defense team and witnesses stayed during the trial. July 1925
Creator/Photographer: Watson Davis
Medium: Black and white photographic print
Dimensions: 3 in x 4.25 in
Culture: American
Geography: USA
Date: 1925
Repository: Smithsonian Institution Archives
Collection: Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs - During 1925, Watson Davis (1896-1967), Science Service managing editor, took numerous photographs while covering the State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes trial as a reporter. In what was dubbed "The Trial of the Century," Scopes was tried and convicted for violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. William Jennings Bryan served on the prosecution team, and Clarence Darrow defended Scopes. Almost eighty years later, the nitrate negatives, including portraits of trial participants, and images from the trial itself and significant places in Dayton, were discovered in archival material donated to the Smithsonian by Science Service in 1971. Marcel C. LaFollette, an independent scholar, historian and Smithsonian volunteer uncovered these rare, previously unpublished photographs of the 1925 Tennessee vs. John Scopes "Monkey Trial" in the Smithsonian Institution Archives (SIA). In 2005, SIA restored fifty-two of the negatives with funds granted by the Smithsonian Women's Committee. Included here are thirty-nine of the images. All images belong to the Record Unit 7091: Science Service, Records, 1902-1965 collection of SIA. All photographs were taken by Watson Davis, Managing Editor of Science Service, while he was in Dayton, Tennessee, June 4-5, 1925, and July 10-22, 1925. LaFollette identified and dated each of these images, and has published a new book highlighting these and other images from the trial entitled, Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century, University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Accession number: SIA2008-1146
Persistent URL: siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_308416
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Lú_ 51 months ago | reply
This image has been used in the indicommons.org post Tennessee v. John T. Scopes.
Lú_ 46 months ago | reply
This photograph is part of the Indicommons.org post And that was July … across the Commons.
Smithsonian Photography Initiative [deleted] 37 months ago | reply
See a blog post featuring this photograph at THE BIGGER PICTURE.
Smithsonian Institution 23 months ago | reply
Learn more about the witnesses in the trial from the Smithsonian Archives research associate who discovered this collection:
blog.photography.si.edu/2011/07/11/scientists-arrive-in-d...