Friday, February 06, 2009

Trivia of the day

Question: When was the first book burned in the New World?

Answer: 1650 in Boston, according to Nat Hentoff in The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America

The first public burning of a book in America ... took place in 1650, when Thomas Pynchon's The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption was ignited in the marketplace of Boston by the common executioner. The author's religious ideas, declared the authorities, differed from the colony's established religion and so had to be obliterated.
I suppose by Michael Savage's standards, the Puritans were "liberals."

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