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Reading Wars by Don Herzog at Abbey's Bookshop,
Reading Wars
— —
Don Herzog

Reading Wars

Don Herzog

$53.95   $45.69

Paperback

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English
LSE Press
23 April 2026
Social & cultural history; Ethical issues: censorship
Reading Wars explores heated, even murderous, political struggles over who gets to read and what they get to read. Those conflicts, once again in the news, stretch back centuries. In this book, Don Herzog examines the history and politics of anxieties about readers and reading, spanning both the United States and Britain, from the 1500s right up to contemporary battles over banning library books and freedom of speech.

In these pages, Herzog deftly interweaves episodes from Reformation England, when first Catholics and then Protestants cracked down on unsupervised Bible-reading, with the deadly campaigns in pre-Civil War America to keep black people – both free and enslaved – illiterate. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, he reconstructs arguments insisting that ordinary men and women could not be trusted to read what they liked – indeed, that some of them ought not read at all. And he charts struggles to promote literacy.

Herzog argues that at stake in these battles is whether some people – those banned from reading – are perceived as not fully human, or lesser persons than others. The radical campaign to let more or less everyone read more or less everything is ultimately, therefore, a campaign for equality.
By:  
Imprint:   LSE Press
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
ISBN:   9781911712510
ISBN 10:   1911712519
Pages:   288
Publication Date:  
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Adult education ,  College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Don Herzog teaches law and political theory at the University of Michigan, where he has won the Golden Apple Award, a university-wide teaching award bestowed by the student body. Among his previous books are Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, Household Politics: Conflict in Early Modern England, Defaming the Dead, and A Little Book of Political Mistakes.

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