Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News: Summary & Key Insights

The story of bunk begins, as so many American stories do, with P. T. Barnum. Barnum understood something essential about his country: that people didn’t just want truth—they wanted spectacle. In the 19th century, he cultivated a culture of humbug, which he defined as "putting on glittering appearances—outside show—and somewhat deceptive trickery." His audiences were not dupes, but participants. They came to his shows knowing, on some level, that what they saw might not be entirely real. But they wanted to be deceived, to suspend disbelief and feel the thrill of complicity.

Humbug, therefore, was not about falsity alone; it was about a shared performance of belief. Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid or General Tom Thumb were displays of manufactured wonder that transformed fakery into entertainment. Such spectacles reflected a wider American appetite for reinvention—the belief that one could become someone new, adopt a story, and project it truthfully enough to be real. The age of humbug coincided with national expansion and self-invention, when identity was a matter not just of birth, but of performance. Barnum embodied that dream: the idea that what mattered was not authenticity, but audacity.

As the 19th century unfolded, humbug evolved into the literary hoax. Writers such as Edgar Allan Poe blurred the lines between reportage and fabrication, producing stories presented as fact—balloon voyages to the moon, premature burials, improbable adventures. The penny press carried these tales to an eager public who consumed them with both credulity and delight. Young argues that the American hoax was the twin of American fiction: both depended on belief, both exposed the pliability of truth.

What fascinated me about these early hoaxes is how they made art out of deception. The hoax, unlike propaganda, didn’t simply try to fool—it performed the act of fooling, drawing attention to the very instability of truth. It was a commentary on media as much as a manipulation of it. To read these stories today is to feel the beginning of a media culture obsessed with novelty, sensation, and virality. The hoax flourished in the very space where truth was still being defined, and in doing so, it helped invent the modern news.