The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-century New York

The Sun and the Moon tells the delightful and surprisingly true story of how, in the summer of 1835, a series of articles in the new “penny paper” the Sun convinced the citizens of New York that the moon was inhabited. Purporting to reveal the discoveries of a famous British astronomer, the series described such moon-life as unicorns, beavers that walked upright, and four-foot-tall flying man-bats, and quickly became the most widely circulated newspaper story of the era.

Told in richly …