Reexamining the Origins of the Adoption of the ALA's Library Bill of Rights

This paper chronicles and examines the development of the idea of intellectual freedom within the context of the American Libraries Association (ALA), specifically how events and statements related to censorship and free access to books and library services helped originate the Library Bill of Rights (LBR) and influenced its adoption by the ALA in 1939. These events are located broadly during the Great Depression, temporally framing the beginning and end points of the analysis between the response of the ALA to article 305 of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff in 1929 and the appointment of Forrest Spaulding to a special ALA committee on censorship by December 1939. This paper has a dual objective. It provides evidence that librarians and the ALA were concerned and alert to the importance of intellectual freedom in spite of the lack of articles about censorship indexed in Library Literature, and that the ALA’s adoption of the LBR was not in response to the pressures against The Grapes of Wrath as suggested in the ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Manual.published or submitted for publicatio

Intellectual Freedom, Cultural Exchange, and Nazi Germany: The Relationship Between the Deutsch-Ausländischer Buchtausch, University of Denver, and Other Cultural Heritage Institutions

Shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, the Prussian State Library was restructured, birthing a new entity – the Deutsch-Ausländischer Buchtausch (German Foreign Book Exchange, DAB). The DAB was responsible for exchanging books and serials with scholarly institutions worldwide. In 1936, the University of Denver (DU) received a gift of books from the DAB. Nearly fifty percent of the books would be categorized as Nazi propaganda or eugenics literature by current standards. Upon further research, it was discovered that the DAB’s relationships included Stanford, Yale, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Institut d\u27Égypte, the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, the University of Bombay, and the countries of Spain and Portugal. This paper provides a detailed review of the DAB-DU case, an examination of the DAB, and reviews of DAB exchanges

When it is Troublesome to Do Right: A Narrative Analysis of the Continual Censorship and “Sivilizing” of Huckleberry Finn

This qualitative dissertation is a part of a broader program of research that investigates intellectual freedom. The study focuses on developing understanding in three distinct, but related, research areas – the American historical and cultural narrative of race, the historical discourse of intellectual freedom, and the role The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can play in adding to and perhaps changing these historic stories. By using historical narrative inquiry, data was examined from each story to find correlations among the discourses Where previous research centers on and develops the reasons why Huck Finn has been challenged, this research focuses on how the reasons for challenging the novel have changed over the last 131 years and provides a conduit for previously unheard voices as they add their stories to the established historical discourse on race and intellectual freedom. The theoretical framework of this research grew out of a study of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophies surrounding storytelling and Jean Francois Lyotard’s deconstruction of the need for a grand narrative to describe historical and cultural events. These two ideas combined with Critical Race Theory (CRT) become the framework to study the three stories being examined in this research. Examination of the collected data through historical time periods and then in relation to each story provided the findings. Two main themes run throughout the entire discourse of these three narratives: marginalization and exclusion

アメリカ図書館界とアメリカ出版界の協同 : 「読書の自由」の成立と展開

筑波大学 (University of Tsukuba)201