Bunnies, Baseball, and Aliens on the Moon

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel

History, Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

April 1, 2023. In honor of April Fools’ Day, we give you three historical tales of the bluff and the bamboozle. An autumn day in 1726, when an English peasant gives birth to something mysterious … and furry. Mets spring training in 1985, as the world meets an otherworldly baseball player with a superhuman arm. Finally, the summer of 1835 in NYC, when a scrappy start-up of a newspaper starts a frenzy about its exclusive: there’s life on the moon! Along the way, we’ll learn what it takes to pull off a convincing hoax. And how we can avoid being duped ourselves!

Special thanks to our guests: Karen Harvey, professor of cultural history at the University of Birmingham and author of The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England; Jay Horwitz, former PR director and current VP of Alumni Relations for the New York Mets; and Matthew Goodman, author of The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:04.9	History this week. April 1st, 2023. April Fullstay.
0:10.9	I'm Sally Helm.
0:13.7	One spring day when I was in elementary school, I was sleeping in because I did not have school that day.
0:19.6	It was the first day of spring break.
0:22.7	My twin sister and I had a friend to sleep over the night before,
0:25.3	and we're all kind of lying around, you know, waking up slowly,
0:28.3	looking forward to a day with nothing to do.
0:30.9	When all of a sudden, the phone rang.
0:34.1	Someone in the house picked it up.
0:35.7	And then a few moments later, my mom comes running into the room,
0:39.2	and she's like, girls, you have to get up right away.
0:41.4	That was the head of school, Mrs. Sleby.
0:43.2	And she said there was a mistake in the schedule,
0:45.6	and you actually do have school today.
0:47.9	It is not spring break.
0:52.2	I still remember leaping out of bed with my sister too, and our friend.
0:55.3	And we're all looking at the clock and realizing how late we were.
0:58.7	And my mom was just standing there.
1:02.2	And then she said, April Fools.
1:07.8	We had not, of course, paused to think how weird it was
1:10.8	that the head of school would have personally called my mom on April 1st
	...

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