Supporters of Scopes, 1925
In honor of the anniversary of the Scopes trial, which ran from July 10 to July 21, 1925, the Smithsonian Institution Archives just released a new set of twenty-five portraits of scientists who agreed to testify on behalf of the defense, according to a post at The Bigger Picture, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's blog.{C} The photographs, taken by Watson Davis, managing editor of the syndicated news service Science Service, have been added to the existing "Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes Trial Photographs" set on the Smithsonian Flickr Commons. The historian Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, whose book Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century (University Press of Kansas, 2008) examined the trial from the perspective of journalist-photographers Watson Davis and Frank Thone, commented in a separate post at The Bigger Picture, "During the week of July 13, an impressive group of experts made their way to Dayton ... Remarkably, the Archives' Science Service collections contain photographs of them all, many taken by Davis or his Science Service colleague, Frank Thone, when they boarded, from July 10 to 22, in a mansion that had been set up to serve as the defense team’s temporary quarters."