Informant38

"Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was banned from classrooms in Midland, Michigan in 1980, due to its portrayal of the Jewish character Shylock. It has been similarly banned in the past in Buffalo and Manchester, NY. Shakespeare's plays have also often been "cleansed" of crude words and phrases. Thomas Bowdler's efforts in his 1818 "Family Shakespeare" gave rise to the word "bowdlerize".
Bowdlerism still exists today, but nowadays cleaning up sexual references is waning in popularity, and cleaning up racial references is growing in popularity. Case in point: This version of The Story of Dr. Dolittle, from the 1960s, was silently "cleaned up" from the 1920 original, in which Polynesia the parrot occasionally used some impolite terms to refer to blacks. In 1988, after the book had fallen from favor enough to have dropped out of print, the publishers issued a new edition that removed nearly all references to race from the book (and cut out a plotline involving Prince Bumpo's desire to become white). In contrast, the Newbery-winning Voyages of Dr. Dolittle has been available in its original form (impolite words and all) for a long time, in part because the Newbery awarders forbade their medal to be displayed on altered texts."

�from Banned Books Online. a well-written, calmly indignant, and strategically essential site, which led to this:

"The process of suppressing information -of people in power attempting to hide images, sounds and words- must itself be viewed in perspective. The organizing principles of The File Room archive recognize acts of censorship in relation to their social settings, political movements, religious beliefs, economic conditions, cultural expressions and/or personal identities. The means of censorship are understood in equally broad terms and techniques, from behind-the-scenes structural censorship that regulates and controls access to the means of production; to obvious physical restrictions of single instances; to subtle, pervasive, and often invisible psychological methods."

�from The File Room

which in turn led to the legal saga of Pen/Newman's Own freedom prize recipient CISSY LACKS-a Missouri high school Creative Writing teacher fired for "failure to censor her students' creative expression."

and to artist Laura Ferguson and her beautiful work
as well as to this Gutenberg of John Milton's Aeropagitica which if anyone's paying attention is the uplifting word whose noun form follows that of Dionysius, author of The Cloud Of Unknowing