These five recent books explore important questions regarding the press and the First Amendment. With the exception of A Question of Sedition, all deal with the relationship between the press and the public, rather than the relationship between the press and the government. In the 1950s and 1960s, most First Amendment doctrines were carved out through conflicts between the government and the press. In A Question of Sedition, Washburn presents such a conventional First Amendment setting in his description of the harassment of the black press by the Roosevelt administration during World War II. Washburn tells the unsurprising story of the attempts by J. Edgar Hoover and others in the government to silence the black press and its denunciation of discrimination in both the military and in American society. The hero in Washburn's story is Attorney General Francis Biddle, who almost single-handedly prevented official government suppression of the black press during World War II. In many ways, Washburn's book is an official recognition of Biddle's “contribution to the preservation of freedom of the press” (p. 205). On a more subtle level, however, it is also a description of the antilibertarian forces at work in our society (explained more in The Tolerant Society).