21 min listen
Bunnies, Baseball, and Aliens on the Moon
ratings:
Length:
28 minutes
Released:
Mar 27, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
April 1, 2023. In honor of April Fools’ Day, we give you three historical tales of the bluff and the bamboozle. An autumn day in 1726, when an English peasant gives birth to something mysterious … and furry. Mets spring training in 1985, as the world meets an otherworldly baseball player with a superhuman arm. Finally, the summer of 1835 in NYC, when a scrappy start-up of a newspaper starts a frenzy about its exclusive: there’s life on the moon! Along the way, we’ll learn what it takes to pull off a convincing hoax. And how we can avoid being duped ourselves!Special thanks to our guests: Karen Harvey, professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham and author of The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England; Jay Horwitz, former PR director and current VP of Alumni Relations for the New York Mets; and Matthew Goodman, author of The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Released:
Mar 27, 2023
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined...: January 11th, 1964. The US Surgeon General announces: smoking is killing us. This week we ask: why did it take so long for the public to learn this deadly truth? And why has it taken even longer for us to accept it? by HISTORY This Week