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Books have always been a key part of the American cultural and social landscape, and thus have often become flashpoints in various culture wars. In fact, throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, certain books - even some we love - have been declared off-limits by those who believe they pose a danger to a certain group (usually children).
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Book ban is a term commonly used to describe labeling a book unsuitable for mass audiences
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and then hindering people from discovering, acquiring, or reading those books. Bans are pursued by individuals, groups, businesses, governments, and even algorithms
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Banning books, or at least doing your very best to ban books, remains a relatively common practice to this day in the U.S. and around the world
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Reasons for banning a book are certainly debatable, but several popular classic books have been the subject of bans for particularly strange reasons
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Today, we're leafing through some of the most ridiculous book bans of all time
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Okay, time to crack open a good book, or a not. The first book ban on record in America was way back in 1637
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and enforced by now what's the city of Quincy, Massachusetts. Yeah, the country wasn't even formed yet
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and already some people were trying to empty bookshelves. New England colonist Thomas Morton had been preparing legal briefs
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for a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay Company and its colony in the New World
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He'd been hired by business interests that hoped to revoke the charter of New England
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so his employer could colonize parts of present-day Massachusetts and Maine. When the lawsuit fell through, Morton turned his notes into a book
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which he titled New English Canaan. Catchy. The three-volume set included a number of his observations about the New World
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particularly the harsh treatment both the indigenous people and the landscape were
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receiving from the colony's Puritan settlers. Though it's not clear whether Morton thought
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his book would actually change the colony or its practices, he laid out a vision for a different
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kind of settlement, one in which natives and colonists engaged in fairer trade and shared
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resources. This all may sound reasonable to modern audiences, but back in the 17th century
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Them's banning words. Morton's book was actually banned twice in its day
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Upon first publication in Holland, copies were seized by the English government
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for unknown reasons. It's actually possible that no one in England had actually read the book, and they just
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assumed the work was anti-Anglican, because a lot of anti-English books were being printed in Holland at the time
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Real passive-aggressive move, Holland. Later, New English canon was also banned in some American colonies
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According to later writer Samuel Maverick, Morton was actually arrested in Boston and
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held in jail for an entire winter as punishment for publishing the work
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No English canon may not have stood the test of time, but wannabe censors have banned many
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other wildly popular books throughout US history. Even the American Heritage Dictionary has been banned a few times
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Apparently, someone took that, you know, gullible isn't in the dictionary joke, very personally
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At different times in the latter half of the 20th century, school libraries and Anchorage
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Alaska, Cedar Lake, Indiana, Folsom, California, and Churchill, Nevada, removed the American Heritage
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Dictionary from their shelves for including objectionable material That is to say dirty words Those bands were eventually removed Hey kids have to know how to spell boobs and butt
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In 1928, following outcry from a number of ministers and educators, the city of Chicago banned L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz
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from all the city's public libraries. That issue was its ungodly influence
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which is a pretty dramatic description of a girl leading a group of cosplayers to a wish-granting wizard
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Even after Wizard of Oz was adapted into its iconic movie in 1939
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the book still wasn't entirely safe. In the 1950s, Florida's state librarian, Dorothy Dodd
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declared the entire Oz series poorly written, untrue to life, sensational, foolishly sentimental
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and consequently, unwholesome for the children in your community. and she embarked on a campaign to pull the books from all of the state's libraries
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Around the same time, the Detroit Public Library also blocked distribution of Wizard of Oz
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saying it had no value for children and supported negativism. Michigan State University professor Russell Nye passionately defended the book from Detroit
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library censors, noting that the Oz books teach children about the importance of love
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kindness, and unselfishness. Challenges to bomb's Oz stories continued even into the
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1980s, when a number of Christian groups got some media attention by objecting to the book's
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depiction of good witches. I kind of remember a bad witch in there, too. You might even call her
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wicked. Some religious groups were also at the root of the infamous campaigns to get J.K. Rowling's
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Harry Potter franchise removed from schools and libraries in the 90s and 2000s. In fact
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Potter books came in at number 48 on the American Library Association's list of most
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frequently challenged books in the 1990s, and it led the 2000s list at number one
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Harry Potter. Dangerous. Maybe they should have put him in a leather jacket and sunglasses on the cover
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Specifically, a number of evangelical Christian churches and communities objected to the numerous
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positive references to the occult that litter the books. Well, it is about magic
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The evangelical group Focus on the Family notes that witchcraft, the primary subject
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taught to children at Hogwarts, is interpreted by some to be denounced in Christian scripture
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Though some school districts and private organizations did succeed in pulling Potter
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from local shelves, most efforts failed, which you probably guessed from all the Harry Potter
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books you can buy, the 11 Harry Potter movies you can watch, all the Harry Potter merch you can
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collect, oh, and the Harry Potter theme park. Maybe we should ban Harry Potter. We have a lot
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of Harry Potter. In 2001, a church in Alamogordo, New Mexico, held an event at which a number of Potter books were burned
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But the local library responded with a large display, ensuring the books remained available to local kids
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Remember that was back when a Harry Potter book could be hard to find A 2006 challenge to the books before the Gwinnett County Georgia school district was shot down and a later appeal to the State Board of Education also failed
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Rest assured, Harry Potter's doing just fine. In 2006, a parents group in Kansas demanded that the local school district ban E.B. White's classic
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Charlotte's Web, claiming that its depiction of talking, intelligent animals was blasphemous
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Yeah, that was 2006. The group argued that because humans are the highest level of God's creation
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then only humans should be depicted with the ability to speak, even though the animals in
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the book only ever speak to each other, and the human characters can't understand them
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Charlotte's spider does write English words on her web, but let's face it
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she was no Shakespeare. Step it up, Charlotte. In the early 1960s, an elementary school in Downey, California
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made national news for banning Edgar Rice Burroughs' iconic Tarzan stories. Their issue wasn't connected to talking animals
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Tarzan's jungle pales mostly kept quiet, but to Tarzan and Jane living together without tying the knot and settling down
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Therefore, the classic romance between the two characters glamorized cohabitating with your partner before marriage
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Of course, Tarzan and Jane may have been postponing their nuptials for practical reasons
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Getting an elephant and several gorillas fitted for your wedding party takes a whole lot of fabric
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Talking animals were also at the root of a peculiar 1931 ban on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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The governor of China's Hunan province at the time declared that animals should not use human language and pulled the book from shelves
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Alice has also come under scrutiny over the years for its alleged promotion of drug use
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particularly the sequence in which Alice eats magical mushrooms and meets a hookah-smoking caterpillar
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That is not exactly subtle. The book was sometimes blocked by local governments
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and school boards in the 1960s due to this material and its affiliation with the psychedelic counterculture of the time
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Banning Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 seems kind of ironic because it's a cautionary tale about banning books
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At least we're pretty sure that's ironic. We'd look up the definition, but somebody banned the dictionary
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A group of parents in Montgomery County, Texas, appealed to remove Fahrenheit 451 from school curricula
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objecting to both its foul language and the fact that the characters of the novel burn a copy of the Bible
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That is literally the point of the book. The school board rejected the requests
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and kept the book in both the local library and schools. The zany Captain Underpants books about two kids who hypnotized their teacher into thinking
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he's actually an underwear-clad superhero certainly seem harmless enough, but even their
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relatively mild anti-authority streak was enough to upset a particularly strict subset of teachers
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and parents According to the American Library Association complaints filed against the books include offensive language partial nudity you know because of the underwear violence and general misbehavior Still the Captain
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Underpants series has also been praised in equal measure for encouraging more kids to start reading
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especially sometimes tough to convince young boys. Childhood Rebellion was also at the heart
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of complaints against Louise Fitzhugh's beloved YA series, Harriet the Spy. In 1983, an Ohio school
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board challenged the book, along with other popular titles like Are You There, God? It's Me
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Margaret, Blubber, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, arguing that Harriet encouraged children to be
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disrespectful. Specifically, the complaint identified Harriet as showing kids the benefits of lying, spying, talking back, and cursing. It's hard to deny the spying part. It's right there in
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the title. Maurice Sendak's illustrated 1963 book, Where the Wild Things Are, has been the subject of
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several library bands across the American South in the years after its release, for all sorts of
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oddly specific reasons. Most of the bands relate to the story's dark themes, which involve a
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disgruntled boy named Max leaving his home and venturing to a magical world inhabited by monsters
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In Ladies Home Journal, writer Bruno Bettelheim criticized the book for delving too deeply into
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fundamental childhood fears, like the loss of food, personal security, and your parents
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You know, the subjects that are in every Disney movie. In 1986, some residents of a small Wisconsin town
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banned the Ruol Dahl book James and the Giant Peach, specifically because of a scene in which the spider character
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licks her lips in a suggestive manner. In 1990, the Culver City, California
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public school district banned a particular illustrated version of the popular fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood
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because it featured an image of the character bringing her grandmother a bottle of wine
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which they felt promoted alcohol use. Look, the grandma is going to get eaten by a wolf in just a minute
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Let her have the wine. A photo of President Barack Obama walking with Chinese leader Xi Jinping
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during an official visit to the U.S. went viral back in 2013
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and it inspired a number of comparisons between Xi and the beloved cartoon bear Winnie the Pooh
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They do have a similar build. In 2018, when Disney released the live-action Winnie the Pooh film Christopher Robin
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the meme came roaring back across Chinese social media platforms. This ultimately led Chinese censors to not only block the film from opening in the country's
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theaters, but to ban all media concerning the honey-loving bear and his friends in the
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Hundred Acre Wood, including the original books by British author A.A. Milne that first introduced
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the character. In 1981, a group of locals in Jackson County, Florida, attempted to ban George Orwell's
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1984 for being pro-communist, missing the point of the book, which was Orwell's pretty clear indictment
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of such authoritarianism. Orwell based the book's evil empire on Nazi Germany
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and Stalinist Russia, which is about as anti-communist as you can be without actually having declared war
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on the Soviet Union
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