A history of ambition in 50 hoaxes / Gale Eaton ; Introduction by Phillip Hoose.

1. Original Trojan horse -- What really happened at Troy? -- 2. The forgery underlying the power of medieval popes -- Constantine, Christian emperor of the Greek East and the Latin West -- 3. Letter from the mythical Prester John -- Imagining the world -- 4. Did Marco Polo really go to China -- Mandeville's travels -- 5. The world's most mysterious book -- A question of motives -- Invented languages -- 6. Was Lambert Simnel a lost prince -- Henry Tudor's claim to the throne -- History of Crowland Abbey: a forged source? -- 7. Michelangelo fakes an antiquity -- A patriotic monk glorifies his hometown -- 8. A mythical island appears on maps of the North Atlantic -- Missing and misidentified islands -- 9. Secrets of an imaginary alchemist -- Paracelsus, scientific rebel -- 10. Stagecraft of Athanasius Kircher -- Kircher's museum: a scientific distraction? -- 11. Dr. Beringer reads lying fossils -- Interpreting fossils in 1725 -- 12. An ancient bard awes the literary world -- England and Scotland -- 13. Benjamin Franklin pretends to be the King of Prussia -- Benjamin Franklin's witch hoax -- 14. Potemkin village: more than just a pretty façade -- 15. Newly discovered Shakespeare play jeered by theater-goers -- Literary forgery as an eighteenth-century epidemic -- 16. Astronomer discovers intelligent life on the Moon -- Voyages to the Moon deemed more plausible than microorganisms in a drop of water -- April fools -- 17. Walam Olum: 90 generations of oral history of a hoax? -- Slanting history -- 18. Was the Fejee mermaid a genuine fake? -- How do you make a mermaid? -- 19. The Fox sisters invent spiritual telegraphy -- Was there really a murdered peddler? -- Spiritual telegraphy and Benjamin Franklin -- 20. Faking a trip to gold rush territory -- Getting to San Francisco -- 21. When giants roamed the earth -- Mark Twain's petrified man -- 22. The Keely Motor Company promises efficient world travel -- Scientific progress and perpetual motion -- 23. The case of the lying encyclopedia -- Wikipedia -- 24. Extracting gold from seawater -- 25. Viking runes in Minnesota -- Scythian gold at the Louvre.

26. A conspiracy to justify murder -- Conspiracy theories and the damage done -- 27. A future great novelist helps hoax the Royal Navy -- HMS Dreadnought and the lead-up to World War I -- 28. Missing link found at Piltdown -- The Piltdown chicken -- How do scientists decide which bones to trust? -- 29. Naked man conquers Maine woods -- Naked publicity gimmicks and hoaxes -- Isolated living in Biosphere 2 -- 30. the spectric poets unmasked -- Two spectric poems -- 31. the original Ponzi scheme -- Pyramid schemes -- 32. Fairies are caught on camera -- Why Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies -- 33. Did Grand Duchess Anastasia survive the Revolution? -- Princess Caraboo -- 34. Houdini debunks a medium -- Other ways of knowing: science and new religions -- 35. If you believe that, I have a tower to sell you -- Unloading the Eiffel Tower -- 36. The Loch Ness Monster -- Standards of evidence and scientific names -- 37. Martians attack -- The BBC panics Britain -- 38. Operation Mincemeat deludes Hitler -- the classic Haversack Operation: 1917 -- 39. Dutch artist arrested for selling a Vermeer to Hermann Göring -- Detecting art forgeries -- 40. The cursed tomb of the last Aztec emperor -- Tombs of heroes -- 41. Donald Crowhurst vanishes at sea -- Yachting technology -- 42. The Tasaday: a stone-age tribe or a hoax? -- Survivals from the dawn of humanity -- 43. A faked autobiography of Howard Hughes -- A memoir of live with wolves -- 44. Moon landing conspiracy theory -- Scientific literacy -- 45. Genuine fake Hitler diaries -- Why 1983? -- 46. More lying stones: Moroccan fossils in the Himalayas -- Why the scientific record needs setting straight -- 47. Crop circle artists confess -- The will to believe -- 48. Physicist Alan Sokal spoofs postmodern scholarship -- Legislating pi -- Scholarly journals and the peer review process -- 49. Joining the campaign to ban DHMO -- Getting both sides of the story -- 50. Microsoft technical support -- Curses and crashing computers: frightening the marks.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-242) and index.
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