Under Trump, book bans have gone federal. Some readers are fighting back.

Good morning. Today we’re explaining how the Trump administration has turned banning books, once a mostly local issue, into a focus for the federal government.

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TODAY’S STARTING POINT

An MIT professor’s study of lyric poetry in Elizabethan England, a children’s book about a freckled 7-year-old girl, and Vice President JD Vance’s best-selling memoir about his working-class roots would seem to have little in common. Yet they all appear to have gotten swept up in the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict Americans’ access to certain books.

Book bans in the US predate the founding of the country. The first known instance was in 1637 in what is now Quincy, Mass. Most efforts to remove books from libraries and school curriculums are usually at the state and local level, hashed out in legislatures, town council meetings, and school board elections.

But the Trump administration’s various efforts to make them a priority of the federal government is novel.

“It’s a definite escalation,” Sabrina Baêta, who researches book bans and censorship at PEN America, a free-expression nonprofit. Today’s newsletter explains the administration’s efforts and how some are resisting them.

Flying off the shelves

Most directly, the Trump administration has removed hundreds of titles from the library of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. As the Globe reported , most mention race, sexuality, or gender — like that scholarly book about Elizabethan poetry.

The administration says the culling reflects a Trump executive order aiming to ban “radical, anti-American ideologies” and diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in K-12 schools, even though most Navy cadets are adults. According to CNN , the Pentagon has ordered other US military academies to identify and remove books that discuss race, gender ideology, and other “divisive concepts” by today.

The Defense Department has also allegedly removed or placed under review hundreds of books from the PreK-12 schools it runs for the children of service members in the US and abroad. According to media reports and an ACLU lawsuit challenging the moves, scrutinized titles include “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance’s memoir; “ Freckleface Strawberry ,” actress Julianne Moore’s semi-autobiographical 2007 children’s book; a history of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre; poems by the 13th-century Islamic poet Rumi; and — without apparent irony — “1984,” George Orwell’s classic about a government that censors information and polices language.

Why officials would have pulled some of those books for review, including Vance’s, isn’t clear. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense Education Activity, which oversees Pentagon-run schools, said she couldn’t comment “as this matter is currently the subject of active litigation.”

But for Baêta, of PEN America, the notion that a Trump order could end up removing a book by his own vice president “speaks to the pernicious nature of censorship.” Trying to stifle certain topics, she said, inevitably sucks in ideas that even proponents might not find objectionable. Arguments in the ACLU’s case are scheduled for early next month.

The administration’s actions could also make it harder for other Americans to access books.

In March, President Trump signed an executive order that aimed to gut the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which provides federal grants to libraries around the country. A judge has blocked that effort for now, but the disrupted grants already have libraries nationwide cutting back on e-books and other offerings. This month Trump fired the librarian of Congress, whom the White House accused of “putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” (The Library of Congress is a research library, not a lending library, and people must be at least 16 to access its collections.)

Trump claims to have “stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech.” But his administration has deleted government data related to gender identity, tried to impose content restrictions on federal arts grants, and stripped terms such as “Black” and “LGBTQ” from government websites . Declaring certain topics off limits “is part of a larger-scale effort to delegitimize these topics,” Baêta said.

The next chapter

But the administration’s efforts, and ongoing attempts in many states and localities to limit access to certain books, have triggered a response from free-speech advocates.

Most Americans oppose banning books from public schools and trust their local libraries to make sound decisions about which titles to collect. PEN America publishes lists of frequently banned books . The American Library Association, another nonprofit, has launched a nationwide campaign to oppose bans. Last week, a judge partially blocked an Iowa law that would ban books with LGBTQ content. In recent years, voters in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and elsewhere rejected school board candidates who favored removing books from libraries. And Massachusetts lawmakers have introduced legislation that would make it harder to do so here.

Book bans can also turn reading itself into an act of resistance. Last fall, the ACLU’s Massachusetts branch started a monthly book club for young people . For April, the book was “The Kite Runner,” Khaled Hosseini’s novel about war-torn Afghanistan. It’s among the most frequently banned books in the US and is allegedly one of the books the Trump administration quarantined from military schools.

Of course, some books do contain information that every kid may not be ready to read. “The Kite Runner” depicts horrible violence and child abuse and those under 18 needed a parent’s permission join the ACLU of Massachusetts’ book club to read it. But Baêta argues that engaging with challenging subjects in a classroom, in a book club, or with a parent is better than encountering them for the first time in the real world.

“We don’t want students to be coming across uncomfortable topics in their lives for the first time in real life,” she said. “We want that to be in a book. What softer introduction is there?”

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BESIDE THE POINT

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Thanks for reading Starting Point.

This newsletter was edited by Andrew Caffrey and produced by Teresa Hanafin .

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