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censorship

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/17/2022

    The Next Front of the Culture War? Your Public Library

    "Conservative activists in several states, including Texas, Montana and Louisiana have joined forces with like-minded officials to dissolve libraries’ governing bodies, rewrite or delete censorship protections, and remove books outside of official challenge procedures."

  • SOURCE: Reuters
    4/7/2022

    PEN Report: More than 1,000 Books Banned in US

    PEN found that 86 school districts had removed 1,145 titles from their shelves over the last nine months, some permanently and others while an investigation was under way.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    2/17/2022

    My Life With Maus

    by Tom Engelhardt

    Although the aftermath of the Tennessee "Maus" controversy involved a flood of donated copies sent to the local community and the book's return to the bestseller charts, the revival of book-banning sentiments bodes ill for the course of the nation. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    2/2/2022

    Book Bans Target Teaching the History of Oppression

    by Marilisa Jiménez Garcia

    Children, particularly those who are part of minority groups, have never been spared from horrors, in history or today. The rhetoric of book-banners is rooted in a privileged viewpoint and serves the interests of inequality today.

  • SOURCE: Minneapolis Star-Tribune
    1/31/2021

    Now Conservatives are the "Discomfort Police"

    by Jeffrey Aaron Snyder

    The left should not be surprised to see the right weaponizing the concept of discomfort to justify a spate of legislation restricting the teaching of difficult historical subjects around race and historical conflict. 

  • SOURCE: Substack
    1/27/2022

    Maus in Tennessee

    by Jeet Heer

    The stated objections to Maus – profanity, nudity, filial disrespect, violence – are impossible to separate from the fact that the book is a graphic history of the Holocaust. 

  • SOURCE: PEN America
    12/13/2021

    Scope, Speed of Educational Gag Order Laws Increasing Nationwide

    by Jeffrey Sachs

    Under the South Carolina bill, racism, fascism, and homophobia can all be understood as cultural or political beliefs. Educators would be prohibited from describing those who hold such beliefs as bigoted or oppressive. 

  • SOURCE: The Atlantic
    12/8/2021

    10 Books Texas Doesn't Want You to Read

    "The subjectivity involved in defining inappropriate, obscene, or distressing—and the danger of politicizing such definitions—is at the center of Krause’s challenge, and it shows in the books on his ban list."

  • SOURCE: Mississippi Free Press
    11/15/2021

    The Hate They Censor: Burying Lessons of History

    The editor of the Mississippi Free Press compares today's national wave of book banning to the efforts to control information that established the "Lost Cause" narrative in early 20th century Mississippi. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    9/13/2021

    Has BYU Canceled a Leading Historian of Mormonism?

    The Neal A. Maxwell Institute appears to be disavowing its previous connections to historian Benjamin Park. Is it because of his objections to some LDS leaders' positions on LGBTQ issues and masking and vaccination in response to COVID? 

  • SOURCE: The New Yorker
    8/27/2021

    EBay Deletes the Queer Past

    The online auction company's decision may make it difficult for historians of LGBTQ cultures and of sexuality to build archives of historically signicant erotica. 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    7/28/2021

    Before the Anti-CRT Activists, there were White Citizens’ Councils

    by David A. Love

    "Employing the techniques of the White Citizens’ Council, a 21st-century White resistance movement threatens to turn back the clock on civil rights and racial justice and create a new future built on erasing the past."