Course Description

Instructor: Steven Harbour

This course will look at attempts to impose censorship in the United States. We begin with a brief history of the censorship of motion pictures, by state and local governments and by the industry’s Hays code, which was primarily focused on portrayals of sex, and the role the United States Supreme Court played concerning such censorship. (We will see that the City of Atlanta played an important role in motion picture censorship.) We will then discuss censorship in time of war, both hot and cold. Next, we will focus on censorship of newspapers and other traditional media, including the recent lawsuit against Fox news. We will conclude with two current topics: censoring hate speech or misinformation on social media and censorship in education. Time permitting, we will also look at proposed limits on corporate donations to political campaigns, which some consider a form of censorship and others disagree.