Edward Larson

Edward J. Larson
Larson delivering a talk at Yale University
Born	(1953-09-21) September 21, 1953 (age 63) Mansfield, Ohio
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Williams College Harvard University University of Wisconsin–Madison
Genre	history of science
Notable awards	Pulitzer Prize for History

Edward John Larson (born September 21, 1953 in Mansfield, Ohio) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and legal scholar. He is university professor of history and holds the Hugh & Hazel Darling Chair in Law at Pepperdine University. He was formerly Herman E. Talmadge Chair of Law and Richard B. Russell Professor of American History at the University of Georgia. He continues to serve as a senior fellow of the University of Georgia's Institute of Higher Education, and is currently a professor at Pepperdine School of Law, where he teaches several classes including Property for the 1Ls.

Larson was born in Mansfield, Ohio, and attended Mansfield public schools. He graduated from Williams College and received his law degree from Harvard University and his Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Larson is married and has two children, Sarah and Luke.

Larson has lectured on topics in the history of science, religion, and law at universities across the United States and in Canada, China, Britain, Australia, and South America. The author of books and articles dealing with voyages of scientific exploration, he has also given lectures at natural history museums and on cruise boats. His articles have appeared in Nature, Scientific American, The Nation, American History, Time, and various academic history and law journals.

Larson received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion. The book argues that Inherit the Wind (both the play and the movie) misrepresented the actual Scopes Trial. Unlike in that play and movie, in which reason and tolerance triumph over religiously motivated, unsophisticated anti-evolutionists, Larson's book portrays the trial as an opening salvo in an enduring twentieth-century cultural war involving powerful national forces in science, religion, law and politics. "Indeed," he concludes in the book, "the issues raised by the Scopes trial and legend endure precisely because they embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion."