Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains a history behind the headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly.

Every week, my colleagues Joanne Freeman, Brian Ballot, Ed Ayers, and me explore a different aspect of American history that's been in the news.

Late last month, the Washington Post reported President Trump has made some 9,451 false or misleading claims throughout his term in office.

Now, the claims are about things big and small. He's falsity accused former President Barack Obama, for example, of initiating the child separation policy at the U.S. Mexico border.

He's also claimed that his dad was born in Germany, but for the record, he wasn't. He was from the Bronx.

Now, Trump supporters have maintained that he's not lying. He's presenting so-called alternative facts. Now, no matter how you look at it, it's clear we're living in what many pundits are calling a post-truth moment, where misinformation, falsehoods, and alternative facts are pretty much everywhere.

This has a history, so today we're digging into the backstory archives to bring you a selection of segments that look at alternative facts in American life.

We'll begin today's show on August 25, 1835. On that day, the New York Sun broke an astonishing story. Life had been discovered on the moon. Here's writer Matthew Goodman.

Including 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-tall 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.

These alternative facts in the New York Sun, the manbats, biped beavers, and unicorns on the moon, arrived at a pivotal moment in American journalism.

Before the 1830s, most newspapers consisted of partisan editorials, articles about international finance, and commodity price charts. These newspapers catered to the nation's merchant class.

The Sun by contrast targeted the booming working class. Its pages were filled with local gossip, crime, and stories about fantastical life on the moon.

Other newspapers followed suit, and before long, a new industry emerged known as the Penny Press. And perhaps more than any story, the great moon hoax helped launch the Penny Press.

When Ed interviewed him a few years back, Matthew Goodman explained that the story was never meant to be taken seriously. In fact, it was cooked up by the Sun's editor, Richard Adam's lock.

Lock was frustrated by religious astronomers who claimed there was life on the Sun, the moon, and the stars, because why else would God have created these heavenly bodies, if not to populate them?

Lock thought this was nonsense. He thought this was religion, masquerading, as science. And he set out to write a satire of these ideas.

He said, well, if you believe in an inhabited moon, I'll give you an inhabited moon. And if you believe that the creatures on the moon are Christians, I will give you lunar manbats who build lunar temples.

And Garbidol in this sort of high-flown language used by the religious astronomers, and in so doing, expose it for the humbug that it is.

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