In 1637, the Puritan government of Massachusetts suppressed Thomas Morton’s "New English Canaan," which was critical of Puritan society. The United States has its own long history of book banning, dating back to the colonial era. (He was just getting started at suppression: The following year, he buried 460 Confucian scholars alive to keep them from spreading their doctrine.)įrom 1560 through 1948, the Roman Catholic Church published a periodic “Index Librorum Prohibitorum,” or “Index of Prohibited Books,” banning many thousands of publications of all kinds for supposed religious or philosophical errors. In 213 B.C., the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi had every manuscript in his realm incinerated except those about agriculture, medicine, future predictions, and his own dynasty’s history.
( These are the best states for public libraries.)īook banning has been around since before there were printed books. School and classroom libraries are in fact the primary targets of those who wish to see books pulled from the shelves or restricted to adult readers, accounting for some 58% of the challenges in 2022, with 41% of the efforts aimed at public libraries. About 90% of these attempts were made by conservative organizations, such as Moms for Liberty, a right-wing non-profit founded in 2021 in Florida - a state whose governor has supported new laws requiring some state schools to close their libraries and cover classroom bookshelves.
In 2022, according to the American Library Association, there were some 1,269 attempts to ban books around the country - some successful, some not (there had been 729 attempts the previous year).
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