With all the hoopla surrounding the Michael Jackson trial, I got to thinking about other famous trials throughout history. I found one site that is very interesting, and it covers trials from thousands of years ago right up to current ones that everyone had heard of. So get out your legal books and get ready to go before the bar.

The site is called Famous Trials, and is a Web site that is maintained by Douglas Linder. He is a professor of law at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, where he teaches constitutional and communications law, among other legal subjects. Here he has created a site that looks at trials that are historic in nature, and it covers a wide period of time. The first one he looks at is the trial of Socrates from 399 B.C., and the most recent is the impeachment trial of President Clinton. In between he looks at court trials of the Salem witches, Oscar Wilde, Leopold & Loeb, Sacco & Vanzetti, the Scottsboro Boy, Alger Hiss, the Rosenbergs, and many, many others…

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The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South.

Who would dominate American culture - the modernists or the traditionalists? Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925…