A Burning Idea: Challenging & Censoring Books — Spring 2019

What makes a book “bad”? Examining a censorship dispute reveals cultural battlegrounds over topics like sex, race, religion, politics, language, and morality. Student teams will examine a censorship challenge in their locality, placing the censorship theme and the challenged work in local and historical contexts. Potential topics include challenges to school reading curriculum, efforts to ban or burn books, or the work of 19th- and 20th-century anti-vice societies. Students can explore themes such as potential authorial intent, reasons for adoption, and the basis for challenging and/or banning the book from use. Using primary source materials, newspaper coverage, secondary literature, and oral histories, students will tell the stories of these disputes through websites that feature digital visualization tools such as story maps, timelines, or text analysis to add new dimensions to their interpretation.