4.7 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2018
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Major funding for Backstories is provided by an anonymous donor, the National |
0:04.4 | Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and |
0:07.9 | Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation. |
0:11.6 | From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstories. |
0:20.4 | Welcome to Backstories, the show that brings you the history behind today's |
0:24.2 | headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly. I'm Ed Ayers. And I'm Joanne Freeman. If you're new |
0:29.4 | to the show, Ed Nathan and I are all historians. Each week we'll take a story |
0:34.0 | from the news and look at that topic across American history. Because of |
0:38.5 | course, what's in the news is rarely new. This is the first in a continuing series |
0:43.4 | on Backstories, looking at the history of the media. We'll begin today's show |
0:47.5 | on August 25th, 1835. On that date, the New York Sun broke an astonishing |
0:53.0 | story. Life had been discovered on the moon. |
0:58.1 | This is writer Matthew Goodman. Including sheep and hairy bison. And as these |
1:07.0 | articles went along, the creatures that were discovered became ever stranger |
1:12.0 | and more remarkable. So it turns out that unicorns were discovered on the |
1:17.1 | moon. And biped beavers, beavers who walk on their hind legs and had |
1:21.9 | discovered the secret of fire. And most remarkable, well, kind of the crowning |
1:27.5 | glory of the series were these lunar manbats, four-foot-tall manbats, who |
1:35.8 | talked and flew and built temples and did art and apparently fornicated in |
1:42.9 | public. Although that was something the sun didn't go into too many details |
1:46.3 | about. I just I just I want to say the word manbat. I mean, all by itself, all by |
1:59.0 | itself. The word manbat is not something I've ever uttered before and it's a |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BackStory, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BackStory and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.