The practice of book burning is often carried out publicly and is usually motivated by moral, political or religious objections to the material. The destruction of books represents some of the most flagrant abuses to free expression in recorded history. Censorship is in many countries not just the United States.

One famous incident of book burning was on May 10, 1933 in Berlin when twenty thousand books were burned during a student rally as the Nazis rose to power in Germany. The Nazis burned books that were anti-Nazi, Jewish-authored, and so called "degenerate" books. However the Nazis were not the only people who burned books. Another famous incident is when the British burned the U.S. Capitol in 1814. The entire Library of Congress was lost but was rebuilt by Thomas Jefferson the "Freethinker." Even in A.D. 392, the library of Serapeum in Alexandria was trashed, burned, and...