When Ancient Egypt Becomes Subversive
A book about the digestive system got pulled off a school library shelf this past year. So did one on ancient Egypt. Somewhere in America, a parent or a politician decided that the inner workings of the small intestine, or the architectural feats of the pyramids, posed a threat to children. That is the country we live in now.
PEN America just released its annual report on book bans in public schools, and the numbers are a gut punch. Between July 2024 and June 2025, 3,743 unique titles were yanked from classrooms and libraries across 23 states, racking up 6,780 total bans. The finding that should rattle every parent, teacher, and citizen who still believes education means learning what is real: nonfiction bans doubled. Books grounded in fact, history, and actual human experience jumped from 14 percent of all banned titles to 29 percent in a single year. Educational and informational works grew from 5 percent to 13 percent of the haul.
We are not just talking about novels with edgy themes anymore. We are talking about textbooks. Biographies. Reference books. The kind of material a fifth grader reaches for when she has a research project on the Aztec empire, or a curious eight-year-old wants to know why his stomach growls.
Of the 1,102 nonfiction titles pulled, 52 percent dealt with activism and social movements. Books like “#WomensMarch: Insisting on Equality.” Books like Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” his memoir of surviving Auschwitz. Stop and consider that. A Holocaust survivor’s testimony, the searing first person account of one of the worst atrocities in human history, is too dangerous for an American teenager to read.
The pattern is not random. PEN America documents that 44 percent of banned books featured people of color, the highest figure they have ever recorded. Another 39 percent featured LGBTQ characters. The American Library Association reports that 92 percent of book challenges in 2025 came from organized outside groups and officials, up from 72 percent the year before. This is not concerned parents thumbing through library catalogs. This is a coordinated political project, fed by lists circulated by national operatives, designed to scrub schools of any narrative that complicates the official story.
What makes the nonfiction surge especially chilling is what it tells us about the destination. PEN’s researchers describe a contempt for facts and expertise that mirrors the playbook of authoritarian regimes throughout history. When you ban a memoir about the Holocaust, you are not protecting children. You are training them to distrust the historical record. When you remove a book on ancient civilizations, you are signaling that knowledge itself is suspect. And when the federal Department of Education dismisses civil rights complaints about book bans as a “hoax,” as it did days after Trump returned to office, you are watching Washington clear a runway for state and local censors to operate with impunity.
We are at a turning point. The ACLU sued over hundreds of book removals at Defense Department schools and won a preliminary injunction last fall. Activists in Tennessee beat back a local ordinance dressed up as decency, with the Rutherford County Library Alliance now poised to receive PEN’s Courage Award. These wins matter. But we cannot outsource this fight to litigators and free speech nonprofits. Show up at school board meetings. Read the actual books your district wants to remove. Ask your candidates ahead of the 2026 midterms where they stand on intellectual freedom. Buy your kids the banned books and read them together.
A society that fears its own history, that flinches from its own diversity, that treats biographies and science books as threats, is a society in retreat from democracy. We have seen this movie before. We get to decide how it ends. Go beyond the ‘cover’…
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