The Sun and the Moon Quotes

“In time [the newsboys] developed their own dialect and traditions and codes of conduct, the prevailing one being the code of the wild, under which smaller newsboys were regularly plundered by larger ones, the littlest of them--some as young as five years old--being as weak and vulnerable as the baby fish that gave them their nickname: small fry.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

“they also abjured what they saw as the manipulation and duplicity of the political newspapers, which, they claimed, sacrificed “every principle of freedom” for the short-term gain of whichever party they happened to favor.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“For Poe, no greater intellectual pleasure could be found than in matching wits with a capable adversary. Of course he greatly enjoyed perpetrating his own hoaxes—a diddle would be no diddle, after all, without a grin—but he also loved to expose the hoaxes of others, taking them apart to reveal their inner workings.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“According to Poe, the hoaxer is the extraordinary, the superior man, for with his hoax he has managed to rise above the foolish, credulous mass of people. (In his account of the Balloon Hoax, Poe refers to them as “the rabble.”) He has achieved his success not by being born into it (an especially sensitive topic for Poe, given how little he received from his wealthy stepfather) or by cultivating friendships with more successful men (Poe was forever railing against the clubbiness of the literary world), but by earning it: his success is a reflection of his own brilliance.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“The entertainment lies less in the nature of the attraction (although as Barnum pointed out, a certain amount of “glitter” is essential) than in the implicit competition between patron and promoter, each one seeking to outwit the other in a game of deception and exposure. It was a distinction on which P. T. Barnum would build a career, and it helps to explain the continuing success of the Sun in the aftermath of the moon series.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“(In response the Sun asserted that Bennett’s “only chance of dying an upright man will be that of hanging perpendicularly upon a rope.”)”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“News was not just the high doings of important persons, but rather the “shreds and patches” of everyday life, a daily record of the city in all its mottled and disorderly splendor.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“In that crucible a new kind of newspaper was born, one that was not merely an organ of the commercial elites, but rather a mass-market medium—politically independent, designed to be read by the average person, and featuring exactly the sort of reporting that continues to mark most newspaper journalism today: crime, scandal, sports, entertainment.”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen

“In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives—a “harem,” Locke called it—six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and “had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays.” (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.)”
― Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteen