An odd conversion of events

I finished reading a book this weekend about the Scopes Monkey Trial. It's one I'm reviewing for Library Journal so when the review is published I'll try to remember to add the link to it. In the meantime thought, what really stuns me about it is the way individuals, serving their own purposes for the most part, just happen to spur events that impact a whole nation and which impacts reverbrate for years.

The Scopes Monkey Trial happened because the town fathers in a small Tennessee town sought to boost the town's economy. At the time, it was against state law to teach Dawinian theory of evolution in public schools. By encouraging a young high school teacher named John Scopes to allow himself to be indicted for breaking this law by teaching evolution in the local highschool. The ACLU leapt to defend him and thus began one of the most widely followed trials of the early 20th century.