Boston’s book censors challenged everything they considered “indecent,” from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which the society’s president called a “darling morsel of literary filth,” to Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.
Meanwhile, obscenity was also a prime target in Boston, the capital of the state that had sanctioned the first book burning in the U.S. ( Read more about the complex early history of abortion in the United States.) The law criminalized the activities of birth control advocates and forced popular pamphlets like Margaret Sanger’s Family Limitation underground, restricting the dissemination of knowledge about contraception at a time when open discussion about sexuality was taboo and infant and maternal mortality were rampant. Championed by moral crusader Anthony Comstock, the laws were designed to ban both content about sexuality and birth control-which at the time, was widely available via mail order.
In 1873, the war against books went federal with the passage of the Comstock Act, a congressional law that made it illegal to possess “obscene” or “immoral” texts or articles or send them through the mail.
#Recently banned book free#
In Maryland, free Black minister Sam Green was sentenced to 10 years in the state penitentiary for owning a copy of the book.Īs the Civil War roiled in the 1860s, the pro-slavery South continued to ban abolitionist materials while Union authorities banned pro-Southern literature like John Esten Cook’s biography of Stonewall Jackson. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īs historian Claire Parfait notes, the book was publicly burned and banned by slaveholders along with other anti-slavery books.
By the 1850s, multiple states had outlawed expressing anti-slavery sentiments-which abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe defied in 1851 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that aimed to expose the evils of slavery. In the first half of the 19th century, materials about the nation’s most incendiary issue, the enslavement of people, alarmed would-be censors in the South. Only four copies of his controversial tract survive today. Outraged, Pynchon’s fellow colonists denounced him as a heretic, burned his pamphlet, and banned it-the first event of its kind in what would later become the U.S. This flew in the face of Puritan Calvinist beliefs that only a special few were predestined for God’s favor. In 1650, prominent Massachusetts Bay colonist William Pynchon published The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, a pamphlet that argued that anyone who was obedient to God and followed Christian teachings on Earth could get into heaven. Most of the earliest book bans were spurred by religious leaders, and by the time Great Britain founded its colonies in America, it had a longstanding history of book censorship. Here’s how book banning emerged in the United States-stretching as far back as when some of the nation’s territories were British colonies-and how censorship affects modern readers today. Though censorship is as old as writing, its targets have shifted over the centuries. ( Did Ovid's erotic poetry lead to his exile from Rome?) Of those challenges, the organization notes, "the vast majority were written by or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community and people of color." In fact, the American Library Association reports that there were a record-breaking number of attempts to ban books in 2022-up 38 percent from the previous year. Her 1970 best seller Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret- recently adapted for film for the first time- has been challenged in schools across the United States for its portrayal of female puberty and religion.Įven Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl has been targeted for censorship-not for its depiction of a young Jewish girl whose family is persecuted by Nazi Germany, but for the passages where the teen discusses her changing body.īook banning never seems to leave the headlines. These names share something more than a legacy of classic literature and a place on school curriculums: They’re just some of the many authors whose work has been banned from classrooms over the years for content deemed controversial, obscene, or otherwise objectionable by authorities.
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