Monday lecture with Brenda Wineapple
Summer Lecture Series
August 26, 2024
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Brenda Wineapple is the author of seven books. Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial that Riveted a Nation (2024) brings to life the dramatic story of the Scopes Trial, a 1925 legal case that captivated the nation and created a circus-like media sensation. The trial’s court proceedings gave rise to two of the best-known orators of the era, Willam Jennings Bryan, who argued that evolution undermined the fundamental, literal truth of the Bible, and Clarence Darrow, who defended the freedom to think, worship, and learn according to individual values. At its heart, the Scopes Trial dramatized conflicts over many of the formative ideals that define America, exposing profound divisions that still resonate today—divisions over the meaning of freedom, religion, education, censorship, and civil liberties in a democracy.
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The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event. The Mount's Health and Safety Guidelines can be found here.
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Sales for all lectures will open for Mount Members on Monday, May 13, and to the general public on Wednesday, May 15. Prices are $15 (Mount Members) and $20 (General Admission). All lectures and panel discussions are free for graduate and undergraduate students, and children under 18. Check back to book online!
- All lectures will take place in an outdoor, open-sided tent. We look forward to seeing you rain or shine.
- Books are available for purchase through The Mount's Bookstore before and during the event.
Brenda Wineapple is the author of seven other books, including The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019), selected by a New York Times book critic as one of the ten best nonfiction works of 2019; Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877 (2013), a New York Times ‘Notable Book’; and White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. A Literature Award recipient from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting, and a Pushcart Prize, she has also received three National Endowment Fellowships plus its Public Scholars Award. Her essays and reviews regularly appear in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, and The Wall Street Journal. In 2023, she was named a Fellow at the Dorothy B. and Lewis Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Wineapple lives in NYC with her husband, composer Michael Dellaira.
Photo: Michelle Valberg
—Jon Meacham
“In this propulsive account of the 1925 Scopes trial, Wineapple documents the antecedents that led to it and how the trial exposed fault lines in America that continue to haunt us. Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan emerge as complicated and fascinating characters who embody different versions of American democracy. Keeping The Faith is a terrific story about a pivotal moment in our history and a book that illuminates the conflicts we are seeing in our country today.”
—Ken Burns
“Much of what we think we know about the famous ‘Scopes trial,’ we don’t. Our misconceptions need correction; and there is no better corrector than Brenda Wineapple.”
—Garry Wills, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln at Gettysburg and What the Qur’an Meant