Banned Books Week is typically held during the last full week of September. This year, it was on the week of September 21st-27th. Founded in 1982 by Judith Krug, Banned Books Week is an annual awareness campaign that draws attention to the history and still-practiced act of book banning/censorship while celebrating the liberty to read. Although the practice of banning books may seem like a thing of the past, the act of literary censorship isn’t restricted to the religious biblioclasm of the Middle Ages or the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s and 40s. In fact, even publications along the lines of Captain Underpants, To Kill a Mockingbird, Lolita, and The Hunger Games have been under public scrutiny. Who’s doing the banning? Historically, a variety of authoritative groups prompt the practice of book banning/burning/censorship for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, it is fair to generalize that all censorship of literature is initiated with the desire to control the knowledge obtained by certain demographic groups. Recent attempts in America to ban books (usually in local public schools and libraries) are typically instigated by parents and sometimes, by school officials. In terms of the modern book banning trend, author Judy Blume describes the practice as “contagious, the desire to control everything in your children’s lives, including what they read.” Despite the continued attempts at book banning within the United States, the American Library Association, in accords with the First Amendment, stringently refuses the notion of literary censorship. The practice of book banning within the United States is limited, at most, to local districts. Historically, however, serious implications of literary censorship have always been manifest. In 399 B.C., the Greek people executed Socrates in an attempt to shield the youth from his ideas. Fortunately, many of his works still exist and are studied today. Between 50 B.C and A.D. 700, over 40,000 original manuscripts were forever lost in the burning of the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, many of which were only copies. Throughout the Middle Ages, Catholic popes can be blamed for the destruction of massive volumes of Jewish literature, and subsequently, much of Jewish culture. Most famously still, censorship of the Bible has prevailed throughout history. Especially in the Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, translated copies of the Bible (into English and German by William Tyndale and Martin Luther, respectively) were often banned/burned. Mostly, the church wanted their religious leaders to maintain power by being the only authentic source of biblical information, instead of having a colloquially legible Bible available. Also notably rejected is Darwin’s Origin of Species, which was banned in the 19th Century by Cambridge’s Trinity College, despite that Darwin was an alumnus of the university. Since the twentieth century, the most famous cases of literary censorship center around the two World Wars and the Cold War. In 1917, the Bolsheviks censored all books in Russia that didn’t encourage communist sentiment. Nazi Germany, during WWII, instigated massive book burnings (and persecution of peoples) that presented ideas contrary to Nazi philosophy. Select works included anything written by Jewish, socialist, or communist authors, including works by Helen Keller, Ernest Hemmingway, Sigmund Freud, among others. In post-WWII United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy fronted a campaign to rid the U.S. of all communist ideas, encouraging libraries to destroy all books deemed pro-communist. Currently, the practice of book banning within the United States isn’t seen on a wide-scale. However, this doesn’t mean that the worldwide practice of censorship is not still substantially practiced, not only in terms of published literature. As the world globalizes immensely day-by-day, at what point will nations and authoritative figures cease to attempt censorship on a massive scale? Or, will attempts at censorship always exist, and the desire to control ideas prevail as it historically has?

Sources:

http://viking.coe.uh.edu/~wmasterson/cuin7337/history.htm

http://people.howstuffworks.com/book-banning3.htm

http://time.com/3418361/banned-books-week/

This article was written by Betsie Wilson. Send an email to [email protected] to get in touch. Photo Credit: Zhang Zhan