The ALA notes that this is just “a snapshot of book challenges,” since an estimated 82-97% of such challenges go unreported. Books are ranked according to the number of public and confidential reports of banning, challenging, or other forms of censorship received by the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. To determine the 25 most banned or challenged books in America in recent times, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on the subject published by the American Library Association for the years 2010-2019. During the Cold War, books perceived to be pro-Communist were condemned in America. In the 19th century, books by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and other authors were banned for their anti-slavery or other then-controversial content. 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. )īook banning has been around since before there were printed books. ( These are the best states for public libraries. 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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