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Editor's Note: From the perspective of Library Sciences, Christine Jenkins offers an historical overview of trends related to book challenges and censorship.
On the one hand, book censorship is an act that involves complaints about very specific texts. Indeed, the classic censorship document, the Roman Catholic Index Librorum Prohibitorum, is simply a (very long) list of the specific texts denounced by the Church since the 1500s. Contemporary lists, such as the Banned Books Resource Guide (Doyle 2007), are similarly specific as to the titles receiving complaints and the specific reason(s) given for challenging their presence in school and public libraries. On the other hand, book censorship involves causes, beliefs, and goals that are far larger than any particular text. Some have described book censorship as the tensions of society writ small, a struggle waged in the limited arena of the pages of a book. And books have been restricted, censored, and even destroyed for reasons of their content and/or author for as long as books have existed.
In the U.S., lists of challenged books appear every September when bookstores, libraries, and schools celebrate Banned Books Week with displays of books that have been challenged at some point(s) in their histories, from J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye to Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. The books in these displays are often accompanied by brief reports on the reasons given for the challenge. Challenges based on a book's perceived inappropriateness for young readers have always been present, but judging from the most recent Banned Books Resource Guide, the proportion of challenges based on audience age has grown over time.
Early censorship attempts, unlike those of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were rarely based on concerns for child protection. Throughout time, however, the "sensitive subject" red flags for censors have remained roughly the same: religion, politics, and sexual content. Typically these texts challenged the religious, political, or sexual states quo-from William Tyndale's English translation of the New Testament (1526) to Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) to Marie Stopes's Married Love (1918). Other texts were challenged not for what they said so much as how they said it. In these cases, the "objectionable language" might be labeled "blasphemous" (religiously objectionable), "treasonous" (politically objectionable), or "lewd" (sexually objectionable),...