Here is information on banned books from the past and reasons behind the bans. This can help give you a background on some literature history if you are a teacher just starting out and looking for more guidance.
Information has been called a powerful resource, and ever since the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440 and even before, there have been attempts to control what people can read. Usually politically or religiously motivated, the bans attempt to keep the populace from obtaining access to viewpoints different than the ones supported by the establishment.
Legal authorities have restricted access to books throughout multiple centuries. In fact, the first book banned in the New England colonies was in 1650 when Pynchon wrote The Meritorious Price of our Redemption, Iustification &C., in which he expressed a slightly different Puritan doctrine than the one that was established by the religious leaders at the Bay Colony in Boston. After it was published in London the following year, the Massachusetts General Court called upon Pynchon to appear before it and retract many of the statements he had written. The pattern of Christian types banning books for their perceived obscene content continued with the ongoing suppression of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a book about a prostitute that contains explicit sexual descriptions, since its publication in 1749. It was cleared of obscenity charges by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966. However, this was by no means the only book facing the same restrictions. Voltaire’s Candide was seized by customs en route to Harvard in 1930, claiming obscenity. It was eventually cleared by arguments of two Harvard professors.
The Comstock Law of 1873, also known as the Anti-Obscenity Act, was passed by congress and kept numerous books from being distributed by the U.S. Postal Service for many years. Titles that fell under the act include Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Defoe’s Moll Flanders and different editions of The Arabian Nights. The law also applied to keeping information about birth control away from the masses, most notably in 1915, when Margaret Sanger’s husband was placed in prison for distributing her Family Limitation, a book that described various forms of birth control. Even outside of the United States, varying religious and political viewpoints have resulted in banned books. Thomas Paine, known for his support of the American Colonies, was indicted for treason for writing The Rights of Man, a book that supported the French Revolution. His work The Age of Reason was also banned for supporting Deism over Christianity and Atheism.
In France, King Louis XIV ordered the Provincial Letters, a book by Blaise Pascall, to be shredded and burned. The French also banned Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered for questioning the authority of kings during the 16th century. The rise of dictatorships in Europe during the 1920’s and 1930’s saw many books being banned, starting with Jack London’s Call of the Wild in Italy. Jack London’s books were all banned in Yugoslavia for being too radical. His socialist novels such as The Iron Heel were banned and burned by the Nazi’s along with other socialist-friendly books. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, a communist country leaning towards atheism, also participated in censorship by banning the Bible and the Quran from 1926 to 1956. These books were not allowed to be imported and were removed from libraries during this period. Some books have been banned across the lines, including works by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His autobiography Confessions was banned in 1929 in the United States for being indecent, and the Soviets banned his philosophical works in 1935 and the Catholic Church placed some of his books on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books during the 18th century. South Africa’s apartheid movement in the 1950’s banned classics, including Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. In difficult political climates the United States has engaged in censorship as recently as the 1950’s, when the Providence, RI post office attempted to block delivery of Lenin’s State and Revolution to Brown University, citing it as subversive. Around the same period of time, McCarthy pulled a certain anthology off library shelves because it included Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.
In recent times, democratic countries have banned books deemed inappropriate or offensive, criminalizing “hate speech.” Canada’s false news law was used to convict Ernst Zündel twice in the 1980’s for writing and promoting his book Did Six Million Really Die? which was an attempt at denying the holocaust. Zündel himself, however, is a proponent for banning books that he does not like, including Schindler’s List, a book about the holocaust. E for Ecstasy, a book on the drug of the same name, was seized by Australian customs as recently as 1994, and as of May 2000, the official ban on the book was still in force. In the 1999-2000 session of the US Congress, bills were passed that banned information on drugs and explosives, effectively shutting down books of that nature. Since conspiracy to commit federal crimes and committing them is already illegal in the United States, creating laws to ban the books seems unnecessary and to be an attack on civil liberties, with the only obvious intent being to keep the knowledge contained in them away from the masses. A wave of book bans hit the United States and Canada towards the end of the 20th Century. The Story of Little Black Sambo, a book that contains offensive images of African-Americans, was banned from Toronto public schools in 1956. In a similar vein, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice was banned in Midland, Michigan in 1980 because of its controversial stereotyping of Jews with its character Shylock. Even an illustrated version of Little Red Riding Hood was banned in 1989 due to images of alcohol being delivered to the grandmother in the story. In Waukegan, Illinois, the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been banned due to use of the word “nigger” and similarly, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer were banned in libraries across the nation and even kept from being taught in public schools for their perceived offensive nature. In Tempe, Arizona a concerned parent attempted to keep the book Tom Sawyer from being taught in the school system only to be shut down by the Supreme Court in 1998, which upheld the right for the book to be taught.
One of the most famous cases occurred in 1925, when John T. Scopes was convicted for teaching Darwin’s Origin of the Species to students in his high school class. The resulting Tennessee law prohibiting teaching evolution theory was taken off the books in 1967, but there have been more recent attempts to stifle scientific knowledge in the classrooms of Tennessee as recently as 1996. These days, there have been rumors about the Bible being banned in Public schools. However, the truth of the matter is that the Bible is allowed to be used in a historical fashion, and not as a conversion tool. Does this still go too far? Sometimes, it may seem to. For example, a student in New Jersey was not allowed to read a story of his choice to the class, which was Jacob and Esau from the Bible. This infringed his First Amendment right to free speech and freedom of religion, and the case was taken to court where it stalled and was not decided. Will banning books ever end? It seems like as long as there is there are people with certain viewpoints in power, no matter what they are, opposing views are shut down. Even today, some governments tightly control religious texts. For example, China banned the Falun Gong sect in 1999 and burned and banned their books. In Saudi Arabia, distribution of Bibles is banned, and in Burma, translation of the Bible into indigenous languages is not allowed.
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