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99 books match the query 'Censorship' and 6 start with a

cover of A History of ALA Policy on Intellectual Freedom: A Supplement to the Intellectual Freedom Manual

A History of ALA Policy on Intellectual Freedom

A Supplement to the Intellectual Freedom Manual

Trina Magi

American Library Association, 2015

Collecting several key documents and policy statements, this supplement to the tenth edition of the Intellectual Freedom Manual traces a history of ALA's commitment to fighting censorship. Beginning with an introductory essay that chronicles ALA policy making on intellectual freedom, this important resource includes sections discussing such foundational issues as

  • library advocacy on social and political issues, from post-World War I disarmament, to Vietnam-era protests, to the call to revisit the field’s rhetoric concerning neutrality;
  • the evolution of the Library Bill of Rights, such as the 1978 revision that eliminated its use of sex-linked pronouns and ALA Council actions rescinding the 2018 interpretation on meeting rooms;
  • protecting the freedom to read;
  • diverse collections and equity, diversity, and inclusion, new to this edition;
  • ALA’s complicated history on race, including a 1936 statement opposing discrimination, inaction amidst litigation to desegregate libraries in the 1950s and 1960s, and protests over Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law;
  • ALA's Code of Ethics;
  • how to respond to challenges and concerns about library resources;
  • internet filtering, minors and online activity, and education and information literacy;
  • programs and displays;
  • policy on governmental intimidation; 
  • copyright; and
  • privacy and confidentiality, including the retention of library usage records.

 

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cover of A Publisher's Paradise: Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

A Publisher's Paradise

Expatriate Literary Culture in Paris, 1890-1960

Colette Colligan

University of Massachusetts Press, 2014

From 1890 to 1960, some of Anglo-America's most heated cultural contests over books, sex, and censorship were staged not at home, but abroad in the City of Light. Paris, with its extraordinary liberties of expression, became a special place for interrogating the margins of sexual culture and literary censorship, and a wide variety of English language “dirty books” circulated through loose expatriate publishing and distribution networks. 

A Publisher's Paradise explores the political and literary dynamics that gave rise to this expatriate cultural flourishing, which included everything from Victorian pornography to the most daring and controversial modernist classics. Colette Colligan tracks the British and French politicians and diplomats who policed Paris editions of banned books and uncovers offshore networks of publishers, booksellers, authors, and readers. She looks closely at the stories the “dirty books” told about this publishing haven and the smut peddlers and literary giants it brought together in transnational cultural formations. The book profiles an eclectic group of expatriates living and publishing in Paris, from relatively obscure figures such as Charles Carrington, whose list included both The Picture of Dorian Gray and the pornographic novel Randiana, to bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, famous for publishing James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922.

A Publisher's Paradise is a compelling exploration of the little-known history of foreign pornography in Paris and the central role it played in turning the city into a modernist outpost for literary and sexual vanguardism, a reputation that still lingers today in our cultural myths of midnight in Paris.

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cover of A Thousand Paper Cuts: US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

A Thousand Paper Cuts

US Empire and the Bureaucratic Life of War

Anjali Nath

Duke University Press, 2025

In A Thousand Paper Cuts, Anjali Nath considers the paper worlds made and destroyed by US imperialism. From the slogans of anti-Communist Cold Warriors against a spectral “Paper Curtain” to the scuttled efforts of activists who sought to document America’s surveillance regime amidst the US war on Vietnam, Nath offers a pre-history of the redacted visions of the Homeland Security age. Nath shows how declassified documents tell the story of American counterinsurgency at home and abroad, revealing the imperial grammar beneath the abundant redactions of contemporary visual culture. Tracing the liberal political rhetoric that inspired the Freedom of Information Act in the 1960s, through to the Bush-era’s exuberant secrecy to the contemporary artists who subversively repurpose redacted documents in collage and critique, Nath maps the formation of the security state, its bureaucratic regimes of surveillance, and the racial logic of transparency.
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cover of After Authority: Global Art Cinema and Political Transition

After Authority

Global Art Cinema and Political Transition

Kalling Heck

Rutgers University Press, 2020

After Authority explores the tendency in art cinema to respond to political transition by turning to ambiguity, a system that ideally stems the reemergence of authoritarian logics in art and elsewhere. By comparing films from Italy, Hungary, South Korea, and the United States, this book contends that the aesthetic tradition of ambiguity in art cinema can be traced to post-authoritarian conditions and that it is in the context of a transition away from authoritarianism where art cinema aesthetics become legible. Art cinema, then, can be seen as a mode of cinematic practice that is at its core political, as its constitutive ambiguity finds its roots in the rejection of centralized and hierarchical configurations of authority. Ultimately, After Authority proposes a history of art cinema predicated on the potentials, possibilities, and politics of ambiguity.
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cover of After the Czars and Commissars: Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia

After the Czars and Commissars

Journalism in Authoritarian Post-Soviet Central Asia

Eric Freedman

Michigan State University Press, 2011

From Czarism and Bolshevism to the current post-communist era, the media in Central Asia has been tightly constrained. Though the governments in the region assert that a free press is permitted to operate, research has shown this to be untrue. In all five former Soviet republics of Central Asia, the media has been controlled, suppressed, punished, and often outlawed. This enlightening collection of essays investigates the reasons why these countries have failed to develop independent and sustainable press systems. It documents the complex relationship between the press and governance, nation-building, national identity, and public policy. In this book, scholars explore the numerous and broad-reaching implications of media control in a variety of contexts, touching on topics such as Internet regulation and censorship, press rights abuses, professional journalism standards and self-censorship, media ownership, ethnic newspapers, blogging, Western broadcasting into the region, and coverage of terrorism.
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cover of America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

America's First Network TV Censor

The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich

Robert Pondillo

Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

 America’s First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC’s Stockton Helffrichis a unique examination of early television censorship, centered around the papers of Stockton Helffrich, the first manager of the censorship department at NBC. Set against the backdrop of postwar America and contextualized by myriad primary sources including original interviews and unpublished material, Helffrich’s reports illustrate how early censorship of advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race shaped the new medium.  

While other books have cited Helffrich’s reports, none have considered them as a body of work, complemented by the details of Helffrich’s life and the era in which he lived. America’s First Network TV Censor explores the ways in which Helffrich’s personal history and social class influenced his perception of his role as NBC-TV censor and his tendency to ignore certain political and cultural taboos while embracing others.

Author Robert Pondillo considers Helffrich’s life in broadcasting before and after the Second World War, and his censorial work in the context of 1950s American culture and emerging network television. Pondillo discusses the ways that cultural phenomena, including the arrival of the mid-twentieth-century religious boom, McCarthyism, the dawn of the Civil Rights era, and the social upheaval over sex, music, and youth, contributed to a general sense that the country was morally adrift and ripe for communist takeover.

Five often-censored subjects—advertising, language, and depictions of sex, violence, and race—are explored in detail, exposing the surprising complexity and nuance of early media censorship. Questions of whether too many sadistic westerns would coarsen America’s children, how to talk about homosexuality without using the word “homosexuality,” and how best to advertise toilet paper without offending people were on Helffrich’s mind; his answers to these questions helped shape the broadcast media we know today.
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