A History of Ambition in 50 Hoaxes

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.