When was censorship introduced

The burning of the Maya Codices in the 16 th century remains one of the worst criminal acts committed against a people and their cultural heritage, and a terrible loss to the world heritage of literature and language. Although the art of printing was vital to the dissemination of knowledge, the establishment of a regular postal service was also an important advancement to communication.

First established in France in , the postal service soon became the most widely used system of person-to-person and country-to-country communication. Consequently, the postal service also played a crucial role as an instrument of censorship in many countries, particularly in times of war.

The British Empire efficiently employed censorship of mail during the first half of the 20 th century. Even in today, the postal service remains a tool of censorship in countries where the import of prohibited literature, magazines, films and etcetera is regulated.

In Europe printing naturally also spurned the development of newsletters and newspapers. The Relation of Strasbourg published in , was regarded as the first regularly printed newsletter. Soon the establishment of newspapers in other European countries followed, catering to a growing public demand for news and information.

The first newspaper appeared in in Switzerland, in the Habsburg territories in Europe in , in England in , in France in , in Denmark in and Italy in , in Sweden in , and in Poland in In some regions of India, however, newsletters had been circulated since the 16 th century.

The rapid growth of newspapers represented a huge improvement of information sources for the literate peoples of Europe. Thus the Licensing Act of was enforced without mercy in Britain until after the Great Plague of In Germany, the press was effectively inhibited during the Thirty Years' War , through censorship, trade restrictions and lack of paper for printing.

Such subtle means of censorship, even today, may effectively hamper the development of the free media in many countries. John Milton's banned speech "Areopagitica". John Milton targeted the powerful bureaucratic system of pre-censorship practiced in late Medieval Europe in his much disputed speech "Areopagitica" to the Parliament of England in Milton vigorously opposed the Licensing Act that Parliament passed in In his noble plea for freedom of the press, Milton also quoted Euripides, adding the weight of the ancient struggle for free expression to his own arguments.

Milton's passionate and strong defence of free expression contributed to the final lapse of the Licensing Act in Britain in His "Areopagitica" also became one of the most quoted arguments for freedom of expression, and remains today a true beacon of enlightenment.

The 17 th and 18 th centuries represented a time of reason in Europe. The rights, liberty and dignity of the individual became political issues, subsequently protected by law in many countries. Sweden was the first country to abolish censorship and introduce a law guaranteeing freedom of the press in , then Denmark-Norway followed suit in Today, the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of speech and the press. It is regarded as the root of the comprehensive protection of freedom of expression in western countries, along with the much quoted statement of the French National Assembly in Although censorship lost ground as the most frequently used legal instrument during and after the 18 th century in Europe, governments maintained laws curbing freedom of expression.

Now the restrictive instruments are legislative acts on national security, criminal acts on obscenity or blasphemy, or libel laws. In the United States, formal censorship never existed. But the libel law could sometimes serve the same purpose; thus American courts became the testing ground for free expression.

This was also the case in Britain after the lapse of the Licensing Act in The courts became the new controllers in many countries that embraced the principles of freedom of expression.

Libel laws were often subject to broad interpretations, allowing for continued restraint, harassment, and persecution of artists, journalists and other intellectual critics that challenged the contemporary concepts of national security, blasphemy and obscenity.

In the 18 th century, the press in most of Europe was frequently subject to strict censorship. The 19 th century saw the emergence of an independent press, as censors gradually had to cede to demands for a free press. Yet this was also an age of strict press censorship in countries such as Japan. The first daily newspaper, the Yokohama Mainichi , appeared in a time when arrests of journalists and suppression of newspapers were all too common.

Also colonial governments, such as Russia and Britain, exercised tight control over political publications in their domains. In Australia full censorship lasted until , while in South Africa a press law was passed in to secure a modicum of publishing freedom. Later in South Africa, however, politics of racial division prevented press freedom. The total suppression during South Africa's Apartheid era was only abandoned in the last decade of the 20 th century.

Although government-instituted censorship had apparently been abandoned in most western countries during the 19 th and most of the 20 th century, public concern for offensive literature did not subside.

Public libraries were expected to act as the benevolent guardians of literature, particularly books for young readers. Consequently this gave teachers and librarians license to censor a wide range of books in libraries, under the pretext of protecting readers from morally destructive and offensive literature.

Surprisingly, in liberal-minded countries such as Sweden and Norway, which boasts the earliest press freedom laws, surveillance of public and school libraries remained a concern to authors and publishers even through the latter part of the century. No less surprising is the die-hard tradition of surveillance of books in schools and libraries in the United States.

Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has remained controversial in the USA because of the author's portrayal of race relations and racial stereotypes. According Arthur Schlesinger, the author of Censorship - Years of Conflict , Twain's book was still in jeopardy of censorship in In spite of the Library Bill of Rights , the library profession's interpretation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, public and school libraries in the US still face demands to remove books of "questionable content" from groups claiming to represent the interest of parents or religious moral codes.

However, the libraries themselves have challenged this practice. The American Library Association ALA , through its Office of Intellectual Freedom, maintains statistics on attempts to censor libraries in various states, and regularly publishes lists of challenged books. Censorship of libraries is by no means a recent practice. On the contrary, libraries have been the targets of censorship since ancient times.

History is littered with facts of destroyed library collections, and libraries themselves have far too often become flaming pyres. As early as BC, the deliberate burning of a library was recorded in China. Although the destruction by fire of , rolls in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 47 BC was by all accounts accidental, the burning of the entire collection of the University of Oxford library in was on direct orders from the king.

Even in the 20 th century, rulers have used the burning and destruction of libraries extensively as warnings to subversives and as a method of ethnic language purging, as was the case in Sarajevo and Kosovo. In the Serbian government banned Albanian as a language of instruction at all levels of education. The Russian empire had a long tradition of strict censorship and was slow to adopt the changes that central European countries had implemented a century before.

Censorship reforms were started in a single decade of tolerance, from to during the reign of Tsar Alexander II. There was a transition from legislation on pre-censorship determining arbitrarily in advance what may or may not be permitted to a punitive system based on legal responsibility.

During this decade the press enjoyed greater freedom and more radical ideas were voiced. Nevertheless censorship laws were re-imposed in practically eliminating the basic ideas of the reform.

Only half a century later the law of abrogated pre-censorship. Finally, all censorship was abolished in the decrees of April 27 that the Temporary Government issued. Sadly the freedom was short lived as the decrees only were in force until October This began a new, long and extensive era of strict censorship under the revolutionary rulers of the USSR lasting until the end of the s.

Taking into account the long history of strict censorship during tsar-regimes, the Russian people have only been without formal censorship in the last decade of this millennium.

The new order of the USSR meant drastic political and economic changes, but also culture, education and religion were subject to revision, all with the idealistic intentions of relieving the new Soviet citizen of the suppressive yokes of feudalism. Hence religion, regarded as gross and misleading superstition, was targeted only a few months after the revolution. In the spring of , a decree was issued formally separating church and state.

Strict prohibitions imposed on religious bodies and nationalization of all church property followed. The rights, liberty, and dignity of the individual became political and then legal issues in many countries. Sweden was the first to abolish censorship and pass a law guaranteeing freedom of the press in Other Scandinavian nations soon followed suit. In , the First Amendment of the American Constitution guaranteed freedom of the press and is regarded as the root of comprehensive freedom of expression in the Western world.

In the 18th century, the press in most of Europe was subjected to strict censorship, but the 19th century saw the emergence of an independent press. The first Japanese daily newspaper appeared in Yokohama in , at a time when arrests of journalists and suppression of newspapers were commonplace. Although government censorship had been largely abandoned in most Western countries during the 19th and 20th centuries, public intolerance of offensive literature did not disappear.

It was first banned in , but was still in peril of censorship in Today, it has been removed from high school and college curricula for its bald representation of a Black slave in the deep South.

The Russian empire had a long tradition of strict censorship and was slow to adopt changes that Central European nations had made a century before. October brought a long and extensive era of strict censorship under the revolutionary rulers of the USSR, which lasted until the end of the s. The Soviets also imposed strict censorship on all occupied nations and satellite states, many of which had been subject to the censorship of imperial Russia.

In , over 25, offensive books were burned in Germany. The famous Ray Bradbury novel, Fahrenheit , later dramatized this concept in a dystopian America in which firemen are hired by the state to burn books that have been secreted away by citizens, just as sympathizers hid Jews from the Nazis during the Second World War.

Hitler, the omnipotent leader of the Third Reich, also implemented the severe censorship and oppressive propaganda machine of the Nazi regime in all nations that were under German occupation. In all such countries, national newspapers, publishing houses, and radio stations were taken over at once or shut down, while radios were confiscated. Throughout history, the media have always been the first victims in times of war. As a rule, the press has been faced with a choice between gagging or closure.

In , when signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the members of the newly formed United Nations pledged to remember the millions murdered in Nazi Germany. Despite this, in full view of the media-saturated international community, history repeated itself in the former Yugoslavia in the s, in Rwanda in , and in modern-day China.

The production code banned lustful kissing, suggestive dancing, nudity. Movies could not mock religion, depict illegal drug use, show interracial romance, or even portray detailed crimes that could be imitated. The Code held sway for decades, but its effectiveness declined after World War II, with family-oriented competition from television and more scintillating foreign films. You may also like: Countries that have mandatory voting.

Lawrence aroused the wrath of U. Reed Smoot, who denounced it in a speech when the Senate was considering loosening restrictions of book imports under the Smoot—Hawley Tariff Act.

The Republican senator from Utah won his battle after threatening to read obscene passages from the book on the floor of the Senate. The ban was lifted in a federal obscenity trial in During World War II, as part of the War Powers Act, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship, which issued guidelines for the media to determine for itself if the information being published would be valuable to the enemy. Under the voluntary censorship, newspapers did not publish photographs of dead U.

The mail was read and censored as well. In the early s, the U. Post Office denied less costly second-class postage privileges to Esquire magazine. A unanimous Supreme Court decision put an end to the postal censorship and, with the ruling, extended the protection of free speech beyond political to popular speech. The Supreme Court decided movies were protected under the First Amendment, reversing its opinion that did not grant them such protection.

Comic books were the focus of censorship arguments over whether they exerted a dangerous influence on children. Publishers in created the Comics Magazine Association of America and a Comics Code Authority Seal of Approval that policed the use of horror, crime, sex, and violence.

You may also like: States that have accepted the most refugees in the past decade. The U. The postmaster general said it was obscene and lewd. After a battle led by famed First Amendment attorney Edward De Grazia, the post office backed off before a trial was held. In , his songs were among those banned from radio stations that were refusing to play music considered to be sexually explicit. Supreme Court ruling in set out a new obscenity test with the case of Samuel Roth, a bookseller in New York accused of sending obscene circulars and an obscene book through the U.

The standard set out under Roth v. Comic Lenny Bruce was arrested on stage and convicted in of obscenity in Chicago. The following year, he was arrested in New York for violating an obscenity law. He was convicted and sentenced to four months in jail, but he remained free on bail and died of a drug overdose in , at You may also like: States with the highest and lowest Trump approval ratings.

A legal ruling in overturned a ban on William S. It was the final work of fiction censored by the U. Post Office and the U. Customs Service. The Motion Picture Association of America in instituted a film ratings system. Network censors would screen and edit the show and censor or delete performances such as an anti-war song performed by Pete Seeger. Tom Smothers asked the Federal Communications Commission and members of Congress to intervene to no avail, and CBS canceled the show in after three years.

The Spider-Man publication of stories involving drug abuse triggered a battle with the Comics Code Authority, which was eased in as a result.