Jacksonville Public Library

A history of ambition in 50 hoaxes, Gale Eaton ; introduction by Philip Hoose

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-265) and index

contains biographical information

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

A history of ambition in 50 hoaxes

bibliography

939427486

Gale Eaton ; introduction by Philip Hoose

History in 50

What do the Trojan Horse, Piltdown Man, Keely Motor Company, and Ponzi Scheme have in common? They were all famous hoaxes, carefully designed and bolstered with false evidence

1. The original Trojan horse -- What really happened at Troy? -- 2. The forgery underlying the power of medieval popes -- Constantine, Christian emperor of the Greek East and the Latin West -- 3. A letter from the mythical Prester John -- Imagining the world -- 4. Did Marco Polo really go to China? -- Mandeville's travels -- 5. The world's most mysterious book -- A question of motives -- Invented languages -- 6. Was Lambert Simnel a lost prince? -- Henry Tudor's claim to the throne -- The history of Crowland Abbey: a forged source? -- 7. Michelangelo fakes an antiquity -- A patriotic monk glorifies his hometown -- 8. A mythical island appears on maps of the North Atlantic -- Missing and misidentified islands -- 9. Secrets of an imaginary alchemist -- Paracelsus, scientific rebel -- 10. The stagecraft of Athanasius Kircher -- Kircher's museum: a scientific distraction? -- 11. Dr. Beringer reads lying fossils -- Interpreting fossils in 1725 -- 12. An ancient bard awes the literary world -- England and Scotland -- 13. Benjamin Franklin pretends to be the King of Prussia -- Benjamin Franklin's witch hoax -- 14. The Potemkin village: more than just a pretty façade -- 15. Newly discovered Shakespeare play jeered by theater-goers -- Literary forgery as an eighteenth-century epidemic -- 16. An astronomer discovers intelligent life on the Moon -- Voyages to the Moon deemed more plausible than microorganisms in a drop of water -- April fools -- 17. The Walam Olum: 90 generations of oral history of a hoax? -- Slanting history -- 18. Was the Fejee mermaid a genuine fake? -- How do you make a mermaid? -- 19. The Fox sisters invent spiritual telegraphy -- Was there really a murdered peddler? -- Spiritual telegraphy and Benjamin Franklin -- 20. Faking a trip to gold rush territory -- Getting to San Francisco -- 21. When giants roamed the earth -- Mark Twain's petrified man -- 22. The Keely Motor Company promises efficient world travel -- Scientific progress and perpetual motion -- 23. The case of the lying encyclopedia -- Wikipedia -- 24. Extracting gold from seawater -- 25. Viking runes in Minnesota -- Scythian gold at the Louvre --26. A conspiracy to justify murder -- Conspiracy theories and the damage done -- 27. A future great novelist helps hoax the Royal Navy -- HMS Dreadnought and the lead-up to World War I -- 28. Missing link found at Piltdown -- The Piltdown chicken -- How do scientists decide which bones to trust? -- 29. Naked man conquers Maine woods -- Naked publicity gimmicks and hoaxes -- Isolated living in Biosphere 2 -- 30. the spectric poets unmasked -- Two spectric poems -- 31. the original Ponzi scheme -- Pyramid schemes -- 32. Fairies are caught on camera -- Why Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies -- 33. Did Grand Duchess Anastasia survive the Revolution? -- Princess Caraboo -- 34. Houdini debunks a medium -- Other ways of knowing: science and new religions -- 35. If you believe that, I have a tower to sell you -- Unloading the Eiffel Tower -- 36. The Loch Ness Monster -- Standards of evidence and scientific names -- 37. Martians attack -- The BBC panics Britain -- 38. Operation Mincemeat deludes Hitler -- the classic Haversack Operation: 1917 -- 39. Dutch artist arrested for selling a Vermeer to Hermann Göring -- Detecting art forgeries -- 40. The cursed tomb of the last Aztec emperor -- Tombs of heroes -- 41. Donald Crowhurst vanishes at sea -- Yachting technology -- 42. The Tasaday: a stone-age tribe or a hoax? -- Survivals from the dawn of humanity -- 43. A faked autobiography of Howard Hughes -- A memoir of live with wolves -- 44. Moon landing conspiracy theory -- Scientific literacy -- 45. Genuine fake Hitler diaries -- Why 1983? -- 46. More lying stones: Moroccan fossils in the Himalayas -- Why the scientific record needs setting straight -- 47. Crop circle artists confess -- The will to believe -- 48. Physicist Alan Sokal spoofs postmodern scholarship -- Legislating pi -- Scholarly journals and the peer review process -- 49. Joining the campaign to ban DHMO -- Getting both sides of the story -- 50. Microsoft technical support -- Curses and crashing computers: frightening the marks

juvenile

History of ambition in fifty hoaxes