Banned Books Week teaches the importance of our First Amendment rights and draws attention to the danger of restricting information in a free society.

In this Wide Angle video, the people behind Kalam Nawaem, or “Sweet Talk,” a popular Arab television, discuss how they must carefully choose their topics and tone to not only increase audience interest, but to keep their program on the air.

At age twenty-seven, physicist Philip Morrison joined the Manhattan Project, the code name given to the U.S. government's covert effort at Los Alamos to develop the first nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project was also the most expensive single program ever financed by public funds. In this video segment, Morrison describes the charismatic leadership of his mentor, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the urgency of their mission to manufacture a weapon 'which if we didn't make first would lead to the loss of the war." In the interview Morrison conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age: 'Dawn,' he describes the remote, inaccessible setting of the laboratory that operated in extreme secrecy. It was this physical isolation, he maintains, that allowed scientists extraordinary freedom to exchange ideas with fellow physicists. Morrison also reflects on his wartime fears. Germany had many of the greatest minds in physics and engineering, which created tremendous anxiety among Allied scientists that it would win the atomic race and the war, and Morrison recalls the elaborate schemes he devised to determine that country's atomic progress. At the time that he was helping assemble the world's first atomic bomb, Morrison believed that nuclear weapons 'could be made part of the construction of the peace.' A month after the war, he toured Hiroshima, and for several years thereafter he testified, became a public spokesman, and lobbied for international nuclear cooperation. After leaving Los Alamos, Morrison returned to academia. For the rest of his life he was a forceful voice against nuclear weapons.

In this class we will come to understand the vast changes in Spanish life that have taken place since Franco's death in 1975. We will focus on the new freedom from censorship, the re-emergence of movements for regional autonomy, the new cinema, reforms in education and changes in daily life: sex roles, work, and family that have occurred in the last decade. In so doing, we will examine myths that are often considered commonplaces when describing Spain and its people.

These learning materials are designed to engage students in hands-on activities that stimulate them, and, most importantly, encourage critical thinking in the classroom. These educational activities in this section will provide high school social studies, media education and language arts teachers, as well as college journalism and communication educators with extensive lesson plans, resource materials, and discussion questions to introduce students to the world of war correspondence.

Reporting America at War offers students invaluable insights as it allows them to experience the life of a war reporter through the lens and the experiences of such noted journalists such as Christiane Amanpour, Walter Cronkite, David Halberstam, Chris Hedges and Morley Safer. The video explores press censorship, message control, the power of pictures, finding the right words, and works by Ernie Pyle and Edward R. Murrow.

" Unlike film, theater in America does not have a ratings board that censors content. So plays have had more freedom to explore and to transgress normative culture. Yet censorship of the theater has been part of American culture from the beginning, and continues today. How and why does this happen, and who decides whether a play is too dangerous to see or to teach? Are plays dangerous? Sinful? Even demonic? In our seminar, we will study plays that have been censored, either legally or extra-legally (i.e. refused production, closed down during production, denied funding, or taken off school reading lists). We'll look at laws, both national and local, relating to the "obscene", as well as unofficial practices, and think about the way censorship operates in American life now. And of course we will study the offending texts, themselves, to find what is really dangerous about them, for ourselves."

This lesson presents facsimiles of 8 printed and hand-written documents surrounding the case of Thomas Cooper, a lawyer and newspaper editor in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, who was indicted, prosecuted, and convicted of violating the Sedition Act after he published a broadside in 1799 that sharply criticized President John Adams. The case is famous in the annals of the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment. This lesson correlates to the National History Standards and the National Standards for Civics and Social Sciences.