Reading wars / Don Herzog.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Herzog, Don, 1956- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Censorship.

Literacy.

Physical Description:

1 online resource ([xii], 275 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

London: LSE Press, 2026.

Summary:

Reading Wars explores heated, even murderous, political struggles over who gets to read and what they get to read. Those conflicts, once again in the news, stretch back centuries. In this book, Don Herzog examines the history and politics of anxieties about readers and reading, spanning both the United States and Britain, from the 1500s right up to contemporary battles over banning library books and freedom of speech. In these pages, Herzog deftly interweaves episodes from Reformation England, when first Catholics and then Protestants cracked down on unsupervised Bible-reading, with the deadly campaigns in pre-Civil War America to keep black people – both free and enslaved – illiterate. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, he reconstructs arguments insisting that ordinary men and women could not be trusted to read what they liked – indeed, that some of them ought not read at all. And he charts struggles to promote literacy. Herzog argues that at stake in these battles is whether some people – those banned from reading – are perceived as not fully human, or lesser persons than others. The radical campaign to let more or less everyone read more or less everything is ultimately, therefore, a campaign for equality. -- Publisher description

Contents:

Introduction: Why Read About Reading Wars?

1. Stop the Presses!

2. Reading Bibles, and Burning Them

3. Censoring Protestants

4. Keeping Black People from Reading

5. Spreading the Word(s): Britain

6. Spreading the Word(s): America

7. The World Turned Upside Down

Notes:

This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + NoDerivatives 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the author(s).

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9781911712527

9781911712534

9781911712541

Access Restriction:

Unrestricted online access