Book censorship in the United States On appeal, her conviction was reversed on the grounds that contraceptive devices could legally be promoted for the cure and prevention of disease. The publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" in 1859 "unleashed a controversy that resonates even today. In presenting a revolutionary theory of evolution, the British naturalist challenged the biblical creation story and provoked the ire of detractors who accused him of 'dethroning God'. Despite the surrounding controversy, "On the Origin of Species" remained uncensored in the United States all the way into the 1920s, when high school curricula started to incorporate the theory of
Genetics and the Origin of Species whiz by." The book began as a series of lectures at Columbia University in October and November 1936. Dobzhansky decided to attend the summer 1936 meeting of the Genetics Society of America in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. When the geneticist Leslie Dunn learned of this, he invited Dobzhansky to give a series of lectures at Columbia. He sent the invitation in April, and within a month he had suggested that the lectures be a springboard for writing a general treatise on evolutionary genetics. Dobzhansky was enthusiastic, and in May he wrote back, proposing the title "Genetics and the Origin of Species".