| From evolution to anti-racism, parents and progressives have clashed for a century over who gets to tell our origin stories.  A stand in Dayton, Tennesee, during the July, 1925, Scopes trial. Photograph from Getty “There’s a rock, and a hard place, and then there’s a classroom.” In this week’s issue, Jill Lepore traces the battle over what gets taught in public schools back to the trial, in 1925, of John T. Scopes, for the crime of teaching evolution in a high-school biology class. A century later, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new outcry in schools has arisen over how to teach American history. On one side are administrators instituting anti-racist curricula; on the other, “what might be called anti-anti-racism measures.” But neither clash has been entirely about biology or history. “Both conflicts,” Lepore notes, “followed a global pandemic and fights over public education that pitted the rights of parents against the power of the state”—and students and teachers are the ones trapped in the middle. —Jessie Li, newsletter editor | 
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