Shapiro, Adam. Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

== Summary ==
Shapiro
places the Scopes trial at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook
publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across
the country. He places the trial in this broad context—alongside American
Protestant antievolution sentiment— to shed new light on the trial and the
historical relationship of science and religion in America. He argues that the
trial must be seen through this lens to challenge what Shapiro sees as a
“self-justification” cycle between science and religion. “Science-religion
conflict explains why there was a Scopes trial, and the Scopes trial proves the
reality of science-religion conflict.” It also challenges the myth of
inevitability, of a conflict between science and religion (evolution and
Christianity). It was a particularly conjecture of circumstances that led to
the trail: The nature of the textbook industry, biology curricula and education
reform, and, especially in the case of Tennessee, the postponement of adopting
new textbooks in 1925 (Tennessee) left A
Civic Biology textbook in the hands of 9th and 10th
graders.