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
On the Origin of Species deal with counter-arguments raised. The third edition came out in 1861, with a number of sentences rewritten or added and an introductory appendix, "An Historical Sketch of the Recent Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species", while the fourth in 1866 had further revisions. The fifth edition, published on 10 February 1869, incorporated more changes and for the first time included the phrase "survival of the fittest", which had been coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer in his "Principles of Biology" (1864). In January 1871, George Jackson Mivart's "On the Genesis of Species" listed detailed arguments against natural selection,