Their skiff'd have ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like it was so it was all wrapped up

but it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing shaped like a bike and had a little ribbon on it

and I was so gas. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now

so for that one change really a lot.

Join in every sip with red carp's now back at Starbucks.

This episode is brought to you by Slack. With Slack you can bring all your people and tools together in one place.

It's your digital HQ where you can increase productivity, enable flexibility and automate workflows.

Plus Slack is full of game changing features like huddles for quick check-ins or Slack Connect which helps you connect with partners inside and outside of your company.

Slack where the future works get started at slack.com slash dhq.

From cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson and I'm Joanne Freeman.

Today's episode is the first and a three episode series in which we'll be discussing the cultural and political elements of banning books.

This week we'll look at three past bookpanics and begin to trace some of the patterns that might help us understand the current unfortunate relevance of this issue.

Next week we'll look more broadly at political and economic attacks on public schools and discuss why schools have been such a center of American culture wars since the early republic.

And for our final episode we'll look at the idea of book bans as an intersection of bullying and politics. We'll also talk about other psychological aspects of bands.

The pressure to self sensor, the relationship between bands and nostalgia and what the resurgence of book bands today says about the collective health of the nation.

This marks the first time that now and then has embarked on a multi episode arc and we are so excited and happy that you're here with us to explore this pressing piece of the American story.

Now obviously this is something that has been in the news a lot beginning really in the fall and continuing and even increasing recently in the news at the beginning of this year.

And we've heard about books being challenged that maybe they shouldn't be present in school libraries. We've heard about books being removed from curricula or actually removed from school libraries or public libraries.

So this has come up in a variety of different ways. But in one way or another we have people stepping forward and challenging the right for libraries and various other institutions to be offering or teaching certain books.

Now it's certainly true that this is not something new unfortunately neither in America or in the world at large as we're going to be talking about today, Heather you and I that there's a long history of controversy over banning or challenging or sidelineing or silencing.

...