Belmont High School Library: And the Banned Played On

Alice in Wonderland Banned Books Week poster from the Schlow Centre Region Library

A class here at the high school, on being presented with the concept that censorship still exists, expressed surprise and a mild amount of disbelief. I was asked to see if I could come up with some examples of books being banned in New Hampshire to provide some local context.

Every year, many libraries observe National Banned Book Month to inform their readership that free access to books is not as smooth and free as it always appears. One of the many things that libraries point out during this time is that many more books are "challenged" than are successfully banned outright. A ban is an actual removal of the book from access within a community, but the challenge is the first salvo, the raising of the question as to whether a book should be circumscribed (the editorial answer from this blog is: always, no). The American Library Association publishes annual national statistics about banned and challenged books every year to raise awareness that there has always been and continues to be a push to restrict and prevent access to ideas, perspectives, and narratives that some wish to eliminate, reduce, or prevent from becoming normalized. More books are challenged than are actually banned, and many school districts and public libraries will attempt to find some middle ground: preventing books from being checked out from anyone but eighth graders in a middle school, for example, or moving a book from the children's section to the adult section, so that a given youth narrative won't be chosen by chance by curious, open-minded little fingers.

But enough generalization. What are actual challenges and bans that have taken place in New Hampshire? Should we cavalierly take being able to read whatever we want, ahem, for granite?

Alice in Wonderland Banned Books Week poster from the Schlow Centre Region Library

The Wikipedia entry on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland quotes an extinct University of California website that compiled a number of historical challenges to classic, well-known works. They make an unsourced claim that Alice was removed from a Haverhill, NH school for "derogatory characterizations of teachers and of religious ceremonies" as well as for swearing and more lascivious content in 1900. So there is apparently a long tradition of New Hampshire prudishness. A banned books blog additionally claims a New Hampshire town also tried again to remove the follow-up Alice's Adventures Through the Looking Glass in 1980 because of perceived drug references.

That same UC website lists that a New Ipswitch, NH school banned the book The Education of Harriet Hatfield because it had a gay protagonist. Both the list and articles that quote it mention that the teacher that taught the novel refused to remove it and was fired in response. Years later, the teacher, having been reinstated, had more books contested because of gay content. Shortly after the first ban, a different New Hampshire school board passed an ordinance prohibiting "Alternative Lifestyle Instruction", which resulted in a ban of many books, including classical texts. The fact that reporting on the policy specifically pointed out that William Shakespeare's "'Twelfth Night' ha[d] been withdrawn from instruction" has meant that the incident regularly appears in listicles about "surprising" banned books, sometimes from major national publications. All in all, a great look for New Hampshire.

While sexuality continues to be a flashpoint for youth-oriented materials and events — the cancelation of a drag queen reading hour in Derry, NH was recently in the national conversation — violence has also been an occasional factor. Local author Jody Picoult's novel about a school shooting, Nineteen Minutes, was intended to provoke conversation about stress, bullying, and our cultural response to violence in the media. Accordingly, the author and publisher provided advance copies to students in Hanover, Newton, and Gilford. Schools had intended to have it be required course reading, and then fears about the content and its emotional impact quickly had it removed from some curricula. However, the book was not removed from Gilford, and its continued inclusion in the curriculum spurred the notorious parent protest about charged sexual language in the book that resulted in a confrontation during a board meeting in 2014. Also combining squeamishness about content, it was reported that in 2010 a New Hampshire parent challenged the inclusion of The Hunger Games in a required reading list in a local middle school, calling it "'filth' that could desensitize children to violence".

Censorship may feel to some like an artifact of the distant past, associated with book burning demonstrations of repression and control that feel almost unthinkable in the current time. But there are those who believe that book challenges are part of a larger wave of a still-growing attempt to censor and control access to thought and experience. Some believe that recent New Hampshire laws are explicitly about censorship of discussion and exposure to information. The American Library Association keeps a blog of its Office of Intellectual Freedom, which tracks current issues in the evolution of freedom of speech, copyright, net neutrality, disinformation, and privacy. For more stories about how they believe New Hampshire intersects with those topics, you can read their archived entries here.

NB: The posters recreated here were found in a selection of Banned Books Week posters collected by Ad/Lib.

# posted by Mr. Russell @ 9:56 AM

Friday, December 03, 2021

And the Banned Played On