Today, free speech is among America’s most powerful values. But for most of the nation’s history, the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech did little to protect those who challenged power or offended public morals. A newspaper publisher could be prosecuted for ridiculing the president. A birth-control advocate could be gagged by Boston’s mayor. Protesters could be jailed for distributing antiwar leaflets, and an author could even be arrested for reading the Constitution aloud.
In Free Speech Generation, FIRE Executive Vice President Nico Perrino tells the dramatic story of the people who made the First Amendment’s promise real. Some were lawyers and professors. Others were journalists, students, internet pioneers, and professional heretics. Many first embraced free speech as a tactic in fights for labor, civil rights, sexual freedom, or peace. However, over time, they forged it into a principle — one they extended even to communists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, flag burners, and pornographers.
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Through vivid portraits and courtroom battles, Free Speech Generation reveals:
How America went 140 years before the Supreme Court first struck down a speech restriction under the First Amendment
Why a Jewish lawyer defended neo-Nazis who wanted to rally where thousands of Holocaust survivors lived
How the Berkeley Free Speech Movement anticipated a constitutional revolution
How burning the American flag came to represent a “bedrock” First Amendment principle
How early cyber-libertarians stopped Congress from imposing broad censorship rules on the emerging internet
Why today’s fights over hate speech, campus censorship, misinformation, and political retaliation continue battles civil libertarians have fought for decades
At once a collective biography, constitutional history, and political drama, Free Speech Generation asks whether the civil libertarians who created America’s Free Speech Century left behind a lasting inheritance — or a fragile achievement already beginning to crack.
PRE-ORDER NICO’S BOOK AND FILL OUT THIS FORM FOR A FREE T-SHIRT
Preorder a copy of Free Speech Generation by Nico Perrino in any format, including ebook, from any retailer (or buy it on release day) and submit your receipt below to receive a limited-edition FIRE T-shirt, free with an order made by Jan. 19, 2027, at 11:59 p.m. ET.
This promotion is limited to one entry per person, and the deadline to submit your proof of purchase is Jan. 19, 2027, at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Those who submit eligible proof of purchase by the deadline, before supplies run out, will receive their T-shirt by mail in February 2027. All shirts ship together after the entry period closes. After the promotion ends, remaining shirts will be sold in FIRE’s online store.
The promotion is restricted to legal residents of the 50 United States and Washington, D.C., who are 18 or older as of the date of entry.
Do you have a receipt? Go here and scroll down to fill out the claim form now.
Book cover art: Used with permission of The Oakland Tribune 2026. All rights reserved.
T-Shirt art: March from Sproul Plaza to Regent’s meeting in University Hall on Oxford St., Steven Marcus Free Speech Movement Photographs, circa 1964, BANC PIC 2000.002--NEG Strip 44:33 © The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/54188