San Antonio College Library

A collection of primary sources on freedom of expression.

Enlarged and revised edition of Legacy of suppression, 1960. Constitution when formulating the First Amendment. Includes consideration of seditious libel.

Marszalek traces the roots of Sherman's hostility toward the press and details his attempts to muzzle reporters during the Civil War, culminating in Sherman's exclusion of all reporters from his famous March to the Sea. Despite the passage of over a century, the question of press rights in wartime situations is very much today what it was during the Civil War. Marszalek finds a recurring movement toward repression of the press, with Sherman's attitudes...

"The history of the fight for free press has never been more vital in our own time, when journalists are targeted as 'enemies of the people.' In this brilliant and rigorously researched history, award-winning journalist and author Ken Ellingwood animates the life and times of abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy. First to Fall illuminates this flawed yet heroic figure who made the ultimate sacrifice while fighting for free press rights in...

In 1733, struggling printer John Peter Zenger scandalized colonial New York by launching the New-York Weekly Journal, which assailed the British governor as corrupt and arrogant -- a direct challenge to the prevailing law against "seditious libel", which criminalized any criticism of the government. Fronting for a group of powerful antiroyalist politicians, Zenger was jailed for nine months before his landmark trial in August 1735, when he was brilliantly...