Banned in Texas

Posted on December 27, 2025 by John Mark Ockerbloom

Struggle over academic freedom in Texas state universities has a long history. Today it’s often over race and gender; in the 1940s, it was over things like John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy. When the University of Texas Board of Regents banned it from classrooms, university president Homer Price Rainey objected to their interference. After they fired him, thousands protested on campus. The first part of the USA trilogy, The 42nd Parallel, joins the public domain in 5 days.

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About John Mark Ockerbloom

I'm a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
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2 Responses to Banned in Texas

  1. Pau Amma's avatar Pau Amma says:
    December 27, 2025 at 3:04 pm

    @everybodyslibraries.com I don't know offhand what caused the missing "o" in the 2nd instance of "PublicDomainDayCountdown" near the bottom (it could be your autocucumber, your Fedi instance misrendering it, or mine doing the same).

  2. John Mark Ockerbloom's avatar John Mark Ockerbloom says:
    December 27, 2025 at 3:12 pm

    @everybodyslibraries.com Thanks! I'd misspelled it in an early saved draft and thought I'd fixed it before publishing, but for some reason even after I fixed it in the post body my WordPress instance kept the misspelling in its metadata along with the intended hashtag. The unintended typo should be gone now from both body and metadata, but let me know if you still see it.

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