history
REACTION TO CHANGE IN MODERN AMERICA The most controversial court case of the 1920's took place in the county of Dayton Tennessee and was commonly referred to as the scopes "monkey" trial. The trial was purposely set up to challenge the constitutionality of the Butler Act. The Butler Act prohibited the teaching of "any theory that denies the story of the divine creation of man as taught in the bible," and in particular, the theory of evolution. The newly formed American Civil Liberties Union sought a teacher willing to be the center of this constitutional challenge. John Thomas Scopes, a local high school track coach and science teacher accepted the challenge and stood trial for teaching evolution the previous spring. The attorneys involved in the trial were Charles Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. One of the lasting aspects of the trial was that it brought the media into the courtroom, and the courtroom into the lives of the American people. The Scopes trial symbolized the debates that raged in American during the early 1900's. That debate was between the conservative religious movement and the new liberalized ideas of evolution or as a debate between science and religion.
In more modern times, such as the sixties and seventies, we have turned to the new, the unknown. This things will bring radical change in America. The traditional values of the Victorian period were being challenged by the new more modern changing thoughts and values. Many people of the time were terrified by the changes taking place and longed for the stability they felt in the past and out of that fear grew the Fundamentalist movement. Behaviors changed, sex wasn't whispered about, people openly lived together, gays were accepted, dress was less formal, women stopped wearing bras, men stopped wearing neckties and women wore pants. We live in a country so rich in natural resources, talent, and labor power the system can afford to distribute just enough wealth to just enough people to limit discontent to a troublesome minority. Long skirts were scandalously abbreviated, and long hair was "bobbed. The changes were reflected in literature and movies and importantly in a new music of protest. " This is a cultural divide that is neither exclusively religious nor scientific. This was a fight for cultural survival. ng an era industrialization and of consumerism and with that the a change in values as well as a change in the roles of men and women in society. The sixties and seventies were times of public pessimism, similar to that of the 1920s. We show signs by our high rate of alcoholism, divorce, drug use, mental illness.
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Acceptance Essays
