By Samuel Cohen

This essay is part of The MLA Democracy Project: Essays on Teaching Democracy and Literature.

The students in my Reading Literature class are largely traditional-age, first-year students, so most of the students in that class in the 2025–26 academic year were born in 2007 or 2008. They hadn’t even reached high school when state legislatures and presidential executive orders began to take aim at The 1619 Project (Hannah-Jones), which means they have grown up in a country that has tried to control what they learn about, what they read, what they know. What I can do, as their teacher, is teach them the things some people don’t want them to be taught and teach them about the efforts to deny them access to certain ideas and texts. Teaching book banning can be a complicated and, in some settings, potentially risky undertaking, but if we want one outcome of our literature courses to be an appreciation, and even championing, of literature by our students, it’s worth it. If we also show them the value of fighting for free access to literature and ideas, then we’ll be teaching the value of democracy and civic engagement.

My fall 2025 course lineup included my department’s Reading Literature class, which I was teaching for the first time. For this course, the instructor selects works to teach the reading of literature and usually chooses works that share a theme or genre. I chose banned books as the theme. I limited my selections to works both written and challenged in the United States; because most of my students come from Missouri, where I teach, I made it a priority to select books that were products of Missouri, banned in Missouri, or both. I did this because I wanted my students to see themselves and their homes in the works we were reading. These connections serve what I set as the course’s dual objectives—on the one hand, for students to develop skills in reading, understanding, and thinking critically about literature and, on the other hand, to think about attempts by fellow citizens to keep literature from them. I lectured on the history of book banning and on its recent increasing incidence. I led discussions of the issues surrounding banning and encouraged students to draw connections and continuities between past and present. The two-birds-with-one-stone moments in the course came with books that were both written by Missourians and banned by Missourians. Reading literature can expand your world beyond where you come from, but it can also expand your understanding of your home; learning about attempts by your neighbors to outlaw the teaching of and access to these same works can help you think about what your neighbors don’t want you to know about your shared home and why they don’t want you to know it. 

Some of the most important moments in the semester came when we saw how it wasn’t even two birds but one big bird. Reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Dick Gregory’s memoir (whose title was represented in the class as N*****), we came to understand that the things these books want you to observe about the world—about riverbank Missouri in the first half of the nineteenth century or St. Louis’s North Side a hundred or so years later—are very much the same things that are apparent in the struggle over democracy that is book banning.

What you see, we discovered over the course of the semester, is a history marked by struggles over national self-definition, over who we are and what we aspire to be, and over who gets to decide. From the first book banned in what would become the United States, New English Canaan, in which Thomas Morton in 1637 criticized the Puritans’ treatment of the Native population, to Slaughterhouse Five, in which Kurt Vonnegut in 1969 questioned how Americans see themselves in the context of how they act in the world, and from the Comstock Act of the nineteenth century to the educational intimidation bills of the 2020s, we see a nation struggling over, for want of a better term, diversity, equity, and inclusion, domestically and internationally (Britannica Editors; Friedman et al.). In Mark Twain’s post-Reconstruction view of the Fugitive Slave Acts and the astroturfing of book challenges by Moms for Liberty, we see the struggle between those who use the law to create a nation in their own image and those who want to use it to create the nation envisioned in the Equal Protection Clause (Seybold; Rohrlich). We see the struggle between the history that begins at Plymouth Rock and the history that begins at Jamestown. We see the attacks on education that include but are so much larger than book banning as attacks on the possibility of a nation constructed in all of our images.

Because this course isn’t a writing course and because AI is ruining everything, I give exams. The second exam, given on the last day, has three sets of extra credit questions. The first set asks students to define terms of literary study—point of view, tone, the ever-popular irony—for a point each; the second asks them to answer one of three book banning history questions, for a single point. The third asks them to run for their local school or library board in ten years and offers them a million points for doing so. I insert this little bit of pedagogical malpractice for fun but also to drive home the point that learning to read and value literature and to understand the history and current practice of challenging access to it can have reach beyond the classroom. These days, teachers are anxious about being perceived to be indoctrinating students, and for good reason. But if we can’t teach our students to appreciate the importance and value of our subject and the necessity of defending access to it, and if we can’t let them know that we think it’s important to defend that access, what are we even doing? 

Works Cited

Britannica Editors. “Comstock Act.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Feb. 2025, www.britannica.com/event/Comstock-Act.

Friedman, Jonathan, et al. “Educational Intimidation: How ‘Parents’ Rights’ Legislation Undermines the Freedom to Learn.” PEN America, 23 Aug. 2023, pen.org/report/educational-intimidation/.

Gregory, Dick. N*****: An Autobiography. 1964. Plume, 2019.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole. The 1619 Project. The New York Times Magazine, 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html.

Morton, Thomas. The New English Canaan. 1637. Boston, 1883. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/54162/54162-h/54162-h.htm. Accessed 24 Apr. 2026.

Rohrlich, Justin. “Moms for Liberty Goes to War with New York School over Five Library Books.” The Independent, 29 May 2025, www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/book-bans-public-schools-moms-for-liberty-trump-new-york-state-b2604694.html.

Seybold, Matt. “Even If He Weren’t My Friend: Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain.” Center for Mark Twain Studies, 2 Aug. 2021, marktwainstudies.com/mark-twain-in-elmira/even-if-he-werent-my-friend-frederick-douglass-mark-twain/.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Penguin Classics, 2014.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Random House, 2007.

Samuel Cohen is associate professor of English at the University of Missouri.