"An examination of how restricting speech has continuously shaped western culture, and how censorship is used as a tool to prop up authorities and maintain class and gender disparities"-- Provided by the publisher.

Helping God along : speech suppression in the ancient world --The fire cure : censorship from late antiquity to Gutenberg -- The printquakes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -- Revolution and control in the eighteenth century -- Class warfare in the nineteenth century -- Trouble in mind : the early twentieth century -- Screaming at the crowd in the contemporary era.