Archive for the ‘Scopes Trial’ tag
The Weight of the Moon or How a Single Textbook Skewed Our View of History
In the 1950s and 1960s, Moon, Mann and Otto’s Modern Biology was the most popular high school biology textbook in the country, commanding upwards of 50% of the market. It was also among the most retrograde and out of date.
Scholars have criticized the book for its weak presentation of the topic of evolution. The 1956 edition is the focus of particular scorn. In that edition all references to human evolution were deleted. The publisher of the second most popular textbook, Exploring Biology, followed suit a few years later.
Had the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) not stepped in to stem the slide by developing new textbooks in early 1960s, would evolution have disappeared from American classrooms altogether? Read the rest of this entry »
After Scopes, Black Was The New Grey
The Scopes trial represented both a crisis and an opportunity for biology textbook authors and publishers.
George W. Hunter, author of the textbook at the center of the trial, was caught flat-footed. He and his publisher, the American Book Company, were midway through a scheduled revision to Civic Biology when the Scopes story went national. They soon
discovered that their competitors had gotten the jump on them by publishing “acceptable” alternatives to texts like his and others not yet hip to the latest fundamentalist fashion.
But what constituted “acceptable?” How many compromises were required to twist biology into something a conservative Tennessee or Texas textbook committee would approve?
As luck would have it, a single textbook provides the answers. Read the rest of this entry »
Biology Textbooks Before Scopes (Updated)
[List updated to include Applied Biology (1911) and Practical Biology (1916)]
Google has now digitized all of the most important and popular American high school biology textbooks published before 1923. Though this date cuts off before the publication of a few of significant “pre-Scopes” textbooks – specifically Henry R. Linville’s Biology of Man and Other Organisms (1923), George W. Hunter’s New Essentials of Biology (1923), Gilbert H. Trafton’s Biology of Home and Community (1923), Peabody and Hunt’s Biology and Human Welfare (1924) and Benjamin C. Gruenberg’s Biology and Human Life (1925) – the books available offer a fascinating window on Progressive Era values and conceits.
The Case of the Disappearing Darwin
It’s a powerful symbol of capitulation: the straight on, serious portrait of Charles Darwin, the wizened, white bearded author of the Origin of Species and father of modern biology, was stripped from the frontispiece of a popular high school textbook, replaced by, of all things, a cartoon of the human digestive tract. According to New York Times writer Susan Jacoby, the insidious nature of the fundamentalist campaign to censor biology textbooks after the Scopes trial of 1925 is “literally illustrated” by this act. In 1921, Darwin was there. By 1926, he was gone. As were all mentions of his theory of evolution.
As with any myth, this one contains a few kernels of truth.
Yes, Darwin did grace the frontispiece of the 1921 edition of Truman J. Moon’s Biology for Beginners. Yes, his portrait was replaced in 1926 by a cartoon of the digestive tract. And yes, by the 1933 edition, the word evolution was gone, not to reappear until after a federally funded effort directed by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) drove all publishers to modernize their texts in the 1960s.
But this story skips lightly over a few complicating facts.
First, Moon replaced the portrait of Darwin with a portrait of Louis Pasteur (full text) in 1924, the year before Scopes. Second, Moon changed his text little between 1924 and editions and revisions published into the early 1930s. And third, though the word evolution did disappear from Moon’s textbook, the number of pages devoted to the subject – under the label “racial development” – actually grew considerably – from 17 pages in 1921, to 68 in 1933. Early scholarship, including Peter Miller’s 1966 honors thesis, “Darwin and the Textbooks,” and Judith Grabiner and Peter Miller’s 1974 article, “Effects of the Scopes Trial,” noted these nuances. However, in repeated retellings, the story has been simplified, and critical information has been lost.
