About the Author

CHARLES A. ISRAEL is an assistant professor of history at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Reviews

Before Scopes is a worthy contribution to southern history. I am very impressed with Israel's research, scholarship, and sophisticated arguments. This should become a standard reference point in works on southern religious and cultural history, standing with recent works by Ted Ownby and Beth Schweiger, among others.
*author of Freedom's Coming: How Religious Culture Shaped the South from Civil War through Civil Rights*

Through a nuanced historical study of the attitudes of Tennessee Evangelicals to the place of religion in public education, Before Scopes sheds new light on the local context for the state's legendary 1925 antievolution law and the resulting trial of John Scopes. Many of the historical tensions chronicled in this book continue to strain American society and public education today.
*author of Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion*

Before Scopes is gracefully written and thoroughly researched. . . . This study deserves the attention of all who are interested in the role of religion in public education.
*Journal of the American Academy of Religion*

With the resurgence of evangelicalism in today’s society and its concomitant influence on education, politics, and mores, Before Scopes has relevance to current differences and their repercussions.
*Midwest Book Review*

Israel skillfully contexualizes the Scopes trial and, without neglecting the intellectual conflict involved, clearly demonstrates that the broader and more significant issue was control of public education in a democratic society. Before Scopes complements the growing literature that undermines the portrayal of southern religion as individualistic and otherworldly. It also demonstrates that future studies on fundamentalism in the South would benefits from the type of contextual labor invested in by Israel.
*Journal of Southern History*

Studies such as Israel’s contribute an important historical perspective. . . . While most examinations of the famous Scopes ‘monkey trial’ trace the consequences of that event, Israel has gone back in time to expose social, cultural, religious, and political roots of the Tennessee antievolution law that set the table for the highly publicized legal battles. . . . The author brings a refreshing and much-needed understanding of southern religion to his work.
*Register of Kentucky Historical Society*

Helps illuminate the issues that give the Scopes trial such lasting historiographical value: marjoritarianism, Southern distinctiveness, the rise of fundamentalism, and schooling in a pluralistic society.
*History: Reviews of New Books*

Offers an intriguing look at how a certain set of evangelicals in one southern state conceived of their own path of modernity.
*Southern Historian*