“I want to be intelligent, even if I do live in Boston.” -an anonymous Bostonian, 1929 In this spectacular romp through the Puritan City, Neil Miller relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase “Banned in Boston.” Bankrolled by society’s upper crust, the New England Watch and Ward Society acted as a quasi-vigilante police force and notorious literary censor for over eighty years. Authors of the essays include Gregory Claeys, Stephen Ingle and Melissa Lane.'-Bloomsbury Publishing

The book's main focus is the public political dimension of censorship and freedom of expression, in its relation to political authority and political thought, while also reflecting on the porous boundary to literature and other areas such as law and the media. Each chapter pairs a textual 'moment' of writing on censorship by a past writer with analysis by an expert current scholar. Censorship Moments provides short, accessible and stimulating essays on a variety of these responses. From the death of Socrates to the present, attempts to silence thinkers and writers have provoked passionate and often penetrating responses that speak of their historical moment. 'Censorship in varying forms has been part of human experience for 2,500 years and has proved to be a recurring presence for political thought, whether as active repression, a shaping context for expression, or as itself a subject for analysis and argument.

Banned in Boston by Neil Miller