Summary of the Scope's "Monkey Trial"

The trial itself was originally planned as a publicity stunt by the town fathers of Dayton, Termessee. Anxious to gamer attention and to provide a test case to challenge the re¬ cently passed Tennessee Butler Act, or "monkey laws" that banned the teaching of evolution, the civic leaders recruited a local high school teacher, John T Scopes, to be their guinea pig. Scopes volunteered to take time off from teaching gym to teach biology for one day so that he could test the law, although later h...

 Esther Dyson Describes the NIIAC

The NIIAC was a well-meaning attempt to collect a diversity of opinion to make sure the emerging "NII" was useful to all Americans, and it probably did more good than I suspected at the time ... The members included the usual suspects: a librarian; a grade school teacher; a communications workers' union official; the head of BMI, a copyright agency; several telecom executives; several "content" people, including a legal publisher and a music-company executive; and old lawyer fried of the Clin...