Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National

Dowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert

Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Joanne Freeman. I'm Mitt Ers. I'm Nathan Connolly. And I'm Brian Balla.

Brian, Joanne, Ed and I are all historians and each week we take a story in the news

and look at it across American history. Today we'll feature some of the stories

we've done over the past year that were inspired by the news. Actually, let's start

with fake news because guess what? It's been around for a heck of a long time.

Here's just one example. In August of 1835, the New York Sun newspaper broke an astonishing story.

Life had been discovered on the moon. This is writer Matthew Goodman, including

a sheep and hairy bison. And as these articles went along, the creatures that were discovered

became ever stranger and more remarkable. So it turns out that unicorns were discovered

on the moon and biped beavers, beavers who walk on their hind legs and had discovered

the secret of fire. And most remarkable, kind of the crowning glory of the series were

these lunar manbats, four-foot-hole manbats who talked and flew and built temples and did art

and apparently fornicated in public. Although that was something the sun didn't go into too many details about.

I just I just I want to say the word manbat. I mean all by itself. All by itself. The word manbat

is not something I've ever uttered before and it's a great word. I can see how it would be good press.

Now you probably figured out by now that this story contains what might be called alternative facts. In other words,

they were made up and made to look like a real news story. You know fake news. And in the past year,

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