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Books

The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn 1073

eldavojohn writes "Over a hundred years after the death of its author, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will be released in a censored format, removing two derogatory racial slurs: 'injun' and 'nigger.' The latter appears some 219 times in the original novel but both will be replaced by the word 'slave.' An Alabama publisher named NewSouth Books will be editing and censoring the book so that schools and parents might provide their children the ability to study the classic without fear of properly addressing the torturous history of racism and slavery in The United States of America. The Forbes Blog speculates that e-readers could provide us this service automatically. Salon admirably provides point versus counterpoint while the internet at large is in an uproar over this seemingly large acceptance of censorship as necessary even on books a hundred years old. The legendary Samuel Langhorne Clemens himself once wrote, 'the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter,' and now his own writing shall test the truth in that today."

Comment Leadership (Score 1) 127

References to forms of national leadership are interesting. A nice peak for the reign of the Virgin Queen, the appearance and growth of President in line with the upstart of those bloody colonies in North America, President finally tops King just about the time of the Great War, but King reasserts until the Second World War finally pushes President on top. Interestingly enough, King comes back and surpasses President just about the turn of the Millennium. http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=King,President,Queen&year_start=1500&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

Comment Re:memories... (Score 1) 266

Eleventh grade for me. I followed the Shuttle program ever since watching Enterprise "launching" from the back of the 747 in glide testing. I remember thinking (in my youthful arrogance) that it was silly and a PR stunt to include McAuliffe on the mission. Launches were becoming routine, but we still stopped everything in Colorado history class to watch the spectacle. Not much else happened in school that day as every class seemed to diminish into quiet speculation as to what could have happened. Lots of discussion too in math and science classes about the space program, the disasters that beset the Apollo and so forth. To this day I fight back chills when I hear Mission Control say "Go with throttle up" during a launch. And in September this year it will all end ...

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