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
Reactions to On the Origin of Species of Selection". Darwin now worked on an "abstract" trimmed from his "Natural Selection" manuscript. The publisher John Murray agreed the title as "On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection" and the book went on sale to the trade on 22 November 1859. The stock of 1,250 copies was oversubscribed, and Darwin, still at Ilkley spa town, began corrections for a second edition. The novelist Charles Kingsley, a Christian socialist country rector, sent him a letter of praise: "It awes me...if you be right I must give up much that I have believed", it was "just as noble a conception