The Great Moon Hoax

📖 The Scoop

This picture book explores the 1835 "Moon Hoax" through the eyes of a fictional but historically plausible newsboy in New York City. Briefly, the Moon Hoax was perpetrated by a reporter at the New York Sun, and for a week in August captured the imagination of the whole city. Unlike Welles's War of the Worlds, this was an entirely fanciful, innocent hoax, with no threat of invasion or violence or any public hysteria. It did, however, have the effect of briefly improving the lives of a relatively new group of workers-newsboys. Newspaper boys were a relatively new phenomenon of the New York streets, having appeared only a few years earlier. Sensational text and lithographs purported to be of scenes visible on the moon through a telescope more than tripled the Sun's circulation, making it the largest circulating newspaper in the world and briefly raising the newsboys' standard of living.

Genre: Juvenile Fiction / Historical / United States / 19th Century (fancy, right?)