No region in the world has won greater notoriety for its hostility to Darwinism than the American South. Despite the absence of any systematic study of evolution in the region, historians have insisted that southerners were uniquely resistant to evolutionary ideas. Rarely looking beyond the dismissals of Alexander Winchell from Vanderbilt University in the 1870s and James Woodrow from Columbia Theological Seminary in the 1880s – or beyond the Scopes trial in the 1920s – they have concluded in the words of Monroe Lee Billington that “Darwinism as an intellectual movement … bypassed southerners.” W. J. Cash, in his immensely influential The Mind of the South, contended that “the overwhelming body of Southern schools either so frowned on [Darwinism] for itself or lived in such terror of popular opinion that possible heretics could not get into their faculties at all or were intimidated into keeping silent by the odds against them.” Darwin's few southern converts either “took the way of discretion” by moving to northern universities or so qualified their discussions of evolution as to render the theory “almost sterile.”

Historians of religion and of science have generally concurred with the judgment of southern historians. Uncompromising antievolutionism, says the American church historian George M. Marsden, “seems more characteristic of the United States than of other countries and more characteristic of the South than of the rest of the nation.” Because the region was more religiously conservative and less well educated than the North, such differences were only to be expected.