San Antonio College Library

With his uncanny ability to spark life in the past, Robert Darnton re-creates three historical worlds in which censorship shaped literary expression in distinctive ways. In eighteenth-century France, censors, authors, and booksellers collaborated in making literature by navigating the intricate culture of royal privilege. Even as the king's censors outlawed works by Voltaire, Rousseau, and other celebrated Enlightenment writers, the head censor himself...

"The United States Constitution, battleground of a politically divided nation and sponsor of that nation's now threatened cultural unity, is a quintessentially political document. Elected officials swear loyalty to it, and U.S. soldiers die for it. Yet no one has ever seriously considered the formative influence this document, so central for all Americans, has had on American cultural life. In this book, Mitchell Meltzer has for the first time demonstrated...