Some believe that censorship is a tool of the conservative, trying hard to shelter eyes and minds from the truths of history and life; but there is a disturbing trend of using it as a tool by liberals to protect themselves from thoughts and ideas that offend them and scarcely anyone else. Both are fools.
But they are not the first and-most certainly- won’t be the last. In fact, Americans have practiced censorship long before this was the [at least on paper] “land of the free”.
Some scholars deliberate whether John Eliot’s The Christian Commonwealth (written in the late 1640s) or William Pynchon’s The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption (1650) was the first book to be banned by the Puritans for theological or historical reasons, but America’s first officially banned book was Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan, published way back in 1637. New English Canaan is a three-volume work collecting Morton’s compassionate observations about Native Americans, along with a celebration of the beauty of the natural world and a stern satire of the Puritans.
