"The Sun and the Moon" by Matthew Goodman

The marvelous truths one can discover when engaging non-fiction stories, such as this one about 1830s New York, though truth is a  relative term when employing hoaxes, is the opportunity such challenges presents a reader to learn something.  I knew nothing about how newspapers, at one time, were read only by the affluent, those who paid six pennies for the latest information necessary to their businesses.  The common man had nothing until the advent of ‘the Sun’ broke open the gates, flooding the city with news all desired to read.  The sensationalism of what these papers printed thoroughly grabbed peoples’ imaginations and paved the way for people like P.T. Barnum, who brought to the city the 161-year-old nursemaid to a young George Washington, and Edgar Allen Poe, whose told the story of man’s first flight to the moon – via a hot-air balloon.