![]() Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism The 850 Books a Texas Lawmaker Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Students Feel Uncomfortable Tennessee School Board Bans Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize Winning Graphic Novel on the Holocaust the Book Becomes #1 Bestseller on Amazon Texas School Board Bans Illustrated Edition of The Diary of Anne Frank You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, Venmo and Crypto. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Hence why we’re flagging Books Unbanned again. But it seemed worth mentioning this program while school’s in full swing. Note: We first posted about this initiative during the dog days of last August. You can find a list of America’s most frequently banned books at the website of the American Library Association. To apply, email In short, send them an email. We don’t necessarily experience a whole lot of that here in Brooklyn, but we know that there are library patrons and library staff who are facing these and we wanted to figure out a way to step in and help, particularly for young people who are seeing, some books in their library collections that may represent them, but they’re being taken off the shelves.Īs for how to get the Brooklyn Public Library’s free eCard, their Books Unbanned website offers the following instructions: “individuals ages 13-21 can apply for a free BPL eCard, providing access to our full eBook collection as well as our learning databases. You know, we’ve been paying attention to a lot of the book challenges and bans that have been taking place, particularly over the last year in many places across the country. This is an intellectual freedom to read initiative by the Brooklyn Public Library. The Chief Librarian for the Brooklyn Public Library, Nick Higgins said:Ī public library represents all of us in a pluralistic society we exist with other people, with other ideas, other viewpoints and perspectives and that’s what makes a healthy democracy - not shutting down access to those points of view or silencing voices that we don’t agree with, but expanding access to those voices and having conversations and ideas that we agree with and ideas that we don’t agree with. ![]() In response to this concerning trend, the Brooklyn Public Library has made a bold move: For a limited time, the library will offer a free eCard to any person aged 13 to 21 across the United States, allowing them free access to 500,000 digital books, including many censored books. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, The Illustrated Diary of Anne Frank, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird–these are some of the many books getting pulled from library shelves in American schools. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.We have covered it before: school districts across the United States are increasingly censoring books that don’t align with conservative, white-washed visions of the world. BPL’s offering will likely prove invaluable to young people in states that may not allow school libraries to carry such books - or states that would allow parents to monitor what their children check out at the library. The BPL press release also cites an initiative called “Moms for Libraries” which is being spearheaded by right-wing group Moms for Liberty the group’s aim, per Media Matters, is to remove books with “inappropriate” content from public schools, and to replace them with books such as the anti-trans children’s book Elephants Are Not Birds.Ĭountless other attacks on free speech, and especially books that contain LGBTQ+ and anti-racist content, are proliferating throughout state legislatures as well. That coordinated censorship effort includes more than 700 complaints made to public libraries in 2021 - the most complaints in a single year on record, according to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom. The press release cites the “increasingly coordinated and effective effort to remove books tackling a wide range of topics from library shelves” as inspiration for this initiative. The list includes LGBTQ+ books like The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, Tomboy by Liz Prince, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. In addition to expanding access for those around the country, BPL is also making unlimited copies of certain challenged books available for all cardholders. From histories of Indigenous identities to ace critiques of our current society of "compulsory sexuality," these 13 queer and trans texts will expand your vision of what it means to be LGBTQ+.
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