Post Written by Library Graduate Assistant Kimberly Braet
October 5th through 11th marks 2025’s Banned Books Week. The first recognized book banning in America took place in 1637 by the Puritan government in what is now known as Quincy, Massachusetts (Taub, 2019). At the time, Thomas Morton’s The New English Canaan was a text written in stark opposition to the Puritan government’s beliefs. His work critiqued and challenged the Puritan customs and power structures that rejected the natural world and sought to suppress and conquer Indigenous peoples. In response to Morton’s defiance of these beliefs, the Puritan government banned his oppositional book and nicknamed him the “Lord of Misrule”.
Engraving of the Puritan militia observing the “immoral” behavior of Thomas Morton’s organized colony of Merrymount (known today as Quincy, Massachusetts)
Beyond the Colonial Era, book bannings and challengings continued to shape the landscape of United States censorship. Popular titles that became the target of book bannings, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries, include literary classics like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, James Joyce’s Ulysses, J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Leadingham, 2025).
In the past 50 years, book banning in the United States has continued with such prevalence that librarians created Banned Books Week in the 1980s to call attention to the widespread censorship of media, thoughts, and ideas that are protected by the First Amendment (Blakemore, 2024). In the year 2024 alone, there were 821 attempts to censor library materials (ALA, 2025). 2024 data reports from the American Library Association also show that of these attempts, organized movements were responsible for 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries, with parents making up 16% of challenges and individual library users comprising 5% of challenges.
Graph from the ALA Censorship by the Numbers 2024 data report
This Banned Books Week, the Lehman Library celebrates books traditionally challenged and targeted for censorship and reflects on the complicated history of book banning within our country. The ALA’s list of most challenged books in 2024 can be found here. Stop by the Lehman Library to explore some of these titles within our collection, enter a drawing to win a copy of 2024’s most challenged book, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and learn more about Banned Books Week by viewing our Banned Books Week display.
References
American Library Association (2025). Top 10 most challenged books of 2024. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
American Library Association (2025). Censorship by the Numbers. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/top10
Blakemore, E. (2024). The history of book bans—and their changing targets—in the U.S.
National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/history-
of-book-bans-in-the-united-states
Leadingham, S. A. (2025). 15 of the Most Famous ‘Banned’ Books in US History. Freedom
Forum. https://www.freedomforum.org/famous-banned-books/
Taub, M. (2019). America’s first banned book really ticked off the Plymouth Puritans. Atlas
Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/americas-first-banned-book
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