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Blog Entry #3: Book Bans
If you have the time, I would recommend reading each section. However, for your convenience, here is a summary of the following information:
Book bans have been around for centuries, as they serve many purposes. Sometimes they are banned to "protect the youth" while other times it could be to serve a government's want to control its people. Currently, book bans are on the rise again with many people concerned about the agenda surrounding books and media in Project 2025. Book bans are controversial as they violate the First Amendment and are often banned due to personal or group dislikes of an idea. Persuasion tactics as simple as fear and testimonials are often used to promote book bans. Propaganda techniques like card stacking, glittering generalities, and name-calling are common, as well. Overall, across party lines in America, most people are against book bans. However, this controversy is far from over. You should care about book bans, because they "diminish the quality of education students have access to and restrict their exposure to important perspectives that form the fabric of a culturally pluralist society like the United States," according to Teacher's College Columbia University expert Sonya Douglass.
What is a book challenge versus a book ban?
What is a book challenge versus a book ban?
A book challenge is the attempt to remove a book or materials based no personal or group objections.
A book ban is the successful removal of said (challenged) book or materials.
The American Library Association has a great FAQ on banned books--the FAQ provided the definitions above.
Why do book bans happen?
According to the First Amendment Museum, here are the top ten reasons books get banned or challenged and what percentage each of the bans or challenges make up:
Sexual Content 92.5%
Offensive Language 61.5%
Unsuited to Age Group 49%
Religious Viewpoint 26%
LGBTQIA+ Content 23.5
Violence 19%
Racism 16.5%
Use of Illegal Substances 12.5%
"Anti-family" Content 7%
Political Viewpoint 6.5%
This link is the longer version of the following abbreviated list. I highly recommend reading the full list, but the list I've curated highlights especially important book bans and their reasons for being banned. More recent bans and challenges will be included in the following sections.
259-210 B.C. The first recorded book ban which resulted in the vivisepulture of 460 Confucian scholars by Chinese emperor, Shih Huang Ti--he wanted history to be said to begin with him, and believed the destroying of all records would ensure that.
35 Roman emperor, Caligula, disliked The Odyssey by Homer (which was written over 300 years before then) due to its Greek ideas of freedom which were deemed dangerous.
1497-1498 Florentine religious fanatic, Savonarola (mentioned above), became infamous for his "bonfires of the vanities." He was so persuasive that he convinced artists to burn their own nude works and poets to stop writing in verse. As a true twist of irony, Savonarola was hung from a cross and burned with his own writings.
1524-1526 William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament was burned by order of London's Roman Catholic bishop. English church authorities wanted the Bible to be inaccessible to commoners (in other words, written in Latin only). Tyndale later burned at the stake for his work, and only three of his original copies remain, today.
1559 The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was publish by Pope Paul IV. This definitive list of banned books for Roman Catholics was one of the most powerful censorship tools in the world.
1597 Queen Elizabeth I was so angry with the deposition of the king in Shakespeare's Richard II that she ordered the scene be removed from all copies.
1616-1642 Galileo's solar system theories and support of Copernicus' discoveries were condemned and Galileo (aged 70 and sentenced to jail) was threatened to be tortured for them, should he not renounce them. His widow was asked to and did destroy some of his manuscripts when he died.
1774 German author, Goethe, published Sorrows of Young Werther. A number of copycat suicides followed the graphically depicted suicide in the book, which was condemned as immoral by the Lutheran Church. The book was banned in Italy, Denmark and Germany. David Phillips, an American sociologist, would write The Werther Effect 200 years later, which studied the effect of reporting suicides.
1859 Charles Darwins's Origin of Species was published and banned from Trinity College, Cambridge, due to it's theory of evolution. It was later banned from1925-1967 in Tennessee; 1935 in Yugoslavia; and 1937 in Greece.
1885 (and on) Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), was called "more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people" by the library of Concord, Massachusetts. The hero was considered a "bad example" for pliant adolescent readers.
1929 Sir Arthur Conan Doyles's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was banned due to its "occultism" in the Soviet Union.
1933 Nazi Germany burned thousands of books. These books were written by Jews, communists, and others; such as John Dos Passsos, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Lenin, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Karl Marx, Erich Maria Remarque, Upton Sinclair, Stalin, and Leon Trotsky.
1937 An Act Respecting Communistic Propaganda (the Padlock Act) was passed by the Quebec government, which allowed the attorney general to confiscate and destroy any works supporting communism or bolshevism.
1953 Work by Anatole France, Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Emile Zola, and William Faulkner were banned by the Irish government for immorality (and subversion for Steinbeck).
1959 Children's book, The Rabbits' Wedding was put on the reserved shelf in Alabama public libraries due to the "promotion" of racial integration.
1973 Drake, North Dakota's school board ordered the burning of Slaughterhouse (Kurt Vonnegut) for profanity and Deliverance (James Dickey) homosexuality.
1974 It was revealed that the CIA demanded the removal of 339 passages from The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence by Victor Marchetti (former senior CIA analyst) and John D. Marks (former U.S. State Department official) before publication. Originally, 171 passages were allowed to be published, and 25 more were allowed in 1980; as of 1989, the most recent edition, numerous censored passages remained.
1977 The CIA once again censors work criticizing the CIA, Decent Interval by former CIA employee, Frank Snepp. The book was published before CIA knowledge, but the CIA filed a lawsuit against Snepp (despite the lack of classified information). With the court ruling against Snepp, the government seized all book profits and places a lifelong gag order against him. Following that, Snepp was required to submit all work to the CIA for review, and the CIA won the right to cut any classified or classifiable information within 30 of receipt of his work.
1980s The London County Council in England banned children's books, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny from all London schools due to the portrayal of only "middle-class rabbits."
1987 Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was removed from the required reading list for North Carolina high school students in Wake County due to the rape of the author at seven and a half years old.
1988 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie was burned by Muslims in the United Kingdom, banned in India and the Republic of South Africa for its "blasphemy" of Islam.
1992 Serbian troops shelled the National Library in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war to destroy Bosnian culture, shooting at anyone who tried to save the books. 1.5 million to 3 million volumes were destroyed, marking this one of the worst book burnings in modern history.
1998 It was suggested by the Association of American Publishers that independent counsel Kenneth Starr "re-read the First Amendment" after Starr ordered a Washington bookstore to turn over records of Monica Lewinsky's book (which depicts her affair with former President Bill Clinton).
2011 Lawrence Hill, the Canadian author of The Book of Negroes, received an email from a Dutch man who said he and others would be burning the book due to their objection of the use of "Negroes" in the title. Hill published Dear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book: An Anatomy of a Book Burning.
2012 Toni Morrision's Beloved was claimed to be sexually explicit, and the depictions of violence of religious viewpoints were objected to in the United States; the book was challenged in public libraries.
2013 I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban was banned in Pakistan in the libraries of 40,000 schools due to the "insufficient" respect for Islam.
2019 The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) was challenged in American public libraries due to "vulgarity and sexual overtones" in the text. In the same year, the Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling) was banned due to depictions of magic, witchcraft, and "nefarious means" for characters to achieve goals.
When did book bans in America first start and why are they relevant today?
When did book bans in America first start and why are they relevant today?
Book banning in America has a long history, beginning in 1637, when a Thomas Morton publication was deemed too critical of Puritan customs and traditional hierarchy. The first book to be banned was Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beacher Stowe due to its support of abolition. Since Roth v. the United States, the definition of "obscenity" and censorship has remained controversial.
"Book bans are oppressive because they don't allow people to see the range of identities that exist in their culture," says neuroscientist and clinical social worker, Renetta Weaver. Education standards become difficult to regulate when books can be prohibited or added in within the curriculum.
Book bans are also a form of censorship, which violates the First Amendment.
Book bans are particularly relevant today, as the new Trump administration's "U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden's Book Ban Hoax." 11 complaints surrounding local school districts' removal of material based on "age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene materials" has (as of January 24th, 2025) been labeled as "a meritless claim premised upon a dubious legal theory." OCR has removed department guidance that removal of "age-inappropriate" books violates civil rights laws and will no longer use a "'book ban coordinator'" to investigate such claims. The USDE argues that this is all in order to restore "the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children's education" as this is a matter of "parental and community judgment, not civil rights."
The American Library Association released this article in response: Book Bans Are Real. They argue that book bans hinder student's who need literary classics for school, families who can't read about gay penguins that share their familial structure, and librarians have been fired for protecting the freedom to read. They point out that the Trump administration is not above the U.S. Constitution, and neither is their support of book bans.
As of January 8th to January 14th of 2025, multiple books have been challenged or banned, including over 400 books on LGBTQ+ topics in Texas and light nudity in Minnesota. In Wisconsin, books-through-bars programs are facing difficulty with the Department of Correction and their bans on books. The Josephine County Board of Commissioners in Oregon voted to terminate the lease of the Grants Pass library branch.
Below, I've attached some graphs of the related to statistics I mentioned.
How are people persuaded or propagandized into supporting book bans?
How are people persuaded or propagandized into supporting book bans?
Simple tactics for persuasion such as fear and testimonials are often used to promote book bans. Propaganda techniques like card stacking, glittering generalities, and name-calling are common, as well.
According to this research article, with the growth of fascism in the 1930s, "human's use of language enabled vast innovation, [but] it also put people at tremendous risk from the harmful demagogues and dictators... film and radio offered new ways to combine entertainment, information, and persuasion." With the increase in access to media, there is and will be an increase in persuasion and propaganda.
All of the reasons from the brief history section are examples of persuasion or propaganda. For example, the ban on Huckleberry Finn used the slippery slope and cause-correlation technique, by implying that reading the book would create an ill-behaved youth. More recently, the argument to ban Huckleberry Finn due to its use of the n-word and being written by a white man works well with the timing technique.
The Big Lie is an infamous propaganda technique that Adolf Hitler used to promote Nazism and book banning and burning. Hitler's big lie and reason to burn books (which was actually a student movement) was based on the false idea that all of Germany's problems were due to Jewish people.
Currently, ad hominem techniques are being used to target books with LGBTQIA+ content. Extreme claims made by people like Bryan Fischer include, "[h]omosexuality gave us Hitler" because Hitler could not get "straight soldiers to be savage and brutal enough" are examples of ad hominem. While extreme, they do not address any rational argument, and are instead used to back bans on LGBTQIA+ media. The idea is that villainizing the LGBTQIA+ and then saying that their books will lead to the corruption of children is an effective way to get books banned--and it's been working. Fischer's extreme claims are a part of the spike in white supremacist propaganda, which is as explained above, tied to anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric and book bans.
Why do book bans still exist and is there a general public opinion on book bans?
Why do book bans still exist and is there a general public opinion on book bans?
As said in this article, people will not agree on what will be banned, so they're always going to argue over who decides what will be banned--and everyone has their own agenda; with everyone having an agenda, books will always be challenged. As an example, conservative and liberal book bans will almost always be different, as each side values different things. However, according to researchers, the vast majority of book challenges do come from conservative-leaning groups; they tend to target books written by or about people of color and LGBTQIA+ people. Liberal sources of book challenges typically challenge books with racist or offensive language.
This being said, sometimes the same book can be targeted for different reasons. Like mentioned previously, Huckleberry Finn has been targeted for its use of the n-word, but it's also been targeted for being "Gender Queer."
Another interesting topic surrounding conservative and liberal book bans is that most voters (71%) oppose book bans in local public libraries according to polling (the column chart displays opposition and support by political affiliation). Despite the fact that the two "sides" disagree on what should be censored, they place trust in their librarians and local libraries to make good decisions and offer a variety of view points. This includes 60% of parents, who oppose book bans in local public libraries.
Below are some graphs displaying the statistics mentioned.
What are some other resources surrounding book bans and the importance of books?
What are some other resources surrounding book bans and the importance of books?
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