Noe Nishizawa

In 1925, when a Tennessee statute outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools, a science teacher volunteered to be arrested so the question could go to court. The result was a highly publicized circus of a legal battle, in which two lawyers, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow, faced off in their defenses of two different books - the Christian Bible and Charles Darwin's groundbreaking On the Origin of Species - in a debate over creationism and Darwinism.

One hundred years after the trial, this debate over what should be taught in school and who should decide persists. Award-winning author Debbie Levy delves into the story of the trial and its striking parallels to our present.

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. Its meteoric rise and fall encapsulated the dynamics of the '80s and foreshadowed the seismic cultural shifts to come after the Cold War.

In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state. In the East, it encouraged new forms of socialization and economic exchanges, while announcing the gradual crumbling of government control over the imagination of the people.