2. AGENDA
•We’ll cover some basics of
Chapter 3: BOOKS and use the
concept of censorship to
jumpstart class discussion
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3. Early Colonists
•Why were the early (1620 – the mid-
1700s) colonists not a book-reading
population?
•They tended to be poor, uneducated and largely
illiterate
•Reading = a luxury they had little time for
•Books were symbols of wealth and status and were
not important to people who considered themselves
pioneers, servants of the Lord, or anti-English
colonists
•Lack of portability
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4. Stamp Act
What was the Stamp Act? Why did
colonial printers object to it?
The 1765 Stamp Act mandated that all printing be
done on paper stamped with the government seal.
This would also control and limit expression in the
increasingly restless Colonies.
Printers objected to this affront on their freedom
and the steep cost of the tax – it would often double
the price of a publication – so they used their
printers to print anti-tax and anti-government
accounts and literature, ironically fueling the fire that
eventually resulted in the Revolutionary War.
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5. Print & the War of Independence
By the mid-1770s anti-British sentiment
had reached its climax
Pamphlets motivated and coalesced political
dissent
After the War of Independence, printing
became central to cultural life in major cities
Books were still expensive, often costing the
equivalent of a working person’s weekly pay
Literacy still considered a luxury
6. Important Cultural Resource
BOOKS ARE…
Agents of social and cultural
change
An important cultural repository of
knowledge
Windows on the past/Mirrors of
Culture
Important sources of personal
development
Wonderful sources of
entertainment, escape and personal
reflection
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7. Censorship
•What is censorship?
•the suppression of speech, mass media,
public communication or other
information which may be considered
objectionable, harmful, sensitive,
politically incorrect or inconvenient as
determined by governments, media
outlets, authorities or other groups or
institutions
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8. Censorship
•Among the library and school books most
targeted by modern censors in the United
States are:
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Harry Potter series
Of Mice and Men
The Color Purple
The Lord of the Rings
Frankenstein
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9. Censorship
• Censorship threatens our citizens’ FIRST AMENDMENT
RIGHT of Freedom of Speech - the right to communicate one's
opinions and ideas without fear of government retaliation or
censorship.
• What are the other FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS?
• The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States
Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an
establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of
religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on
the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to
peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a
governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on
December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that
constitute the Bill of Rights.
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13. Aliteracy + Students
•According to one survey, many college students
chose not to read because they felt they didn't
need to read to "get by". They were only interested
in putting in the least amount of reading, and at the
same time expected an "A" in the class. These
students in the survey also claimed that their
reading habits were learned from their parents,
who also were not very interested in reading, or
who did not wholly value the reading of books.
These students did not correlate reading with
advancement of knowledge.
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14. Aliteracy & Censorship
• Aliteracy as Self-Censorship: Censors ban and
burn books because books are repositories of
ideas, ideas that can be read and considered
with limited outside influence or official
supervision.
• But what kind of culture develops when, by our
own refusal to read books, we figuratively save
the censors the trouble of striking the match?
Aliteracy, wherein people possess the ability to
read but are unwilling to do so, amounts to doing
the censors' work for them.
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15. TRENDING FUTURE OF BOOKS
• PLATFORM AGNOSTICISM
• P-O-D = Publishing/Printing on Demand
• E-Publishing & E-Books = a major trend in the
mass media book industry
• E-PUBLISHING: The publication of books initially
or exclusively online
• E-BOOKS: books downloaded in electronic form from
the Internet to computers, dedicated readers, or
mobile digital devices
• What might a “book” be like in the
future?
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