Hoax : a history of deception : 5,000 years of fakes, forgeries, and fallacies /
An entertaining collection of the most audacious and underhanded deceptions in the history of mankind, from sacred relics to financial schemes to fake art, music and identities. World history is littered with tall tales and those who have fallen for them. Ian Tattersall, a curator emeritus at the Am...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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New York :
Black Dog & Leventhal,
[2018]
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| Edition: | First edition. |
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Table of Contents:
- Other animals: Evolution of the con
- Apocalypticism: the end of the world as we know it
- Pseudoarkeology: The ark at the end of the rainbow
- Predetermined combat: Gladiators and pro wrestlers
- Selling empires: The Julian purchase
- Cryptozoology: The Loch Ness Monster
- Sacred relics: The precious prepuce
- Gender bending: Pope Joan
- Sindonology: The Shroud of Turin
- Renaissance reprobates: Michelangelo's Cupid
- Fraudulent ethnicity: Psalmanazar
- Romantic suicide: Thomas Chatterton
- Counterfeit wine: Thomas Jefferson's Lafite
- PseudoShakespeare: The boy who would be bard
- Cryptoanthropology: The saga of Bigfoot
- Imaginary lands: Poyais
- Alternate realities: Faked photographs
- Aerial feats: Edgar Allan Poe and the great balloon hoax
- Communing with the departed: Spiritualism and evolution
- Diddling: The original con man
- Pseudoarchaeology: The Davenport tablets
- Ultimate diets: Breatharianism
- Deathbed conversions: The Lady Hope
- Forged documents: The Priory of Sion
- Public credulity: Political lies
- Political persecutions: The Dreyfus affair
- Financial fraud: The scammer scammed
- Fake paleoanthropology: Piltdown
- Arctic exploration: Robert Peary
- Quack medicine: Radionics
- Mythogenesis: the six Mona Lisas
- Fake music: Fritz Kreisler
- Pseudoplanetology: Flat and hollow Earths
- Fake art: Tribute or exploitation?
- Dialectical biology: Lysenkoism and its consequences
- Counterfeit cadavers: "The man who never was"
- Invented identities: Korla Pandit
- Misguided archaeology: A lion in winter
- Circumnavigations that weren't: The sad saga of Donald Crowhurst
- Lunacy: Conspiracy theories
- Human variation: The fallacy of race
- Eternal life: the frozen self
- Homeopathy: The memory of water
- Pseudopaleontology: "Archaeoraptor"
- Unreliable memories: Fake memoirs
- Irrational hysteria: Vaccines and autism
- Peer review: Jan Hendrik Schön
- Bogus security: Fake bomb detectors
- Faked deaths: Pseudocide
- Fake journalism: Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and their legacy.