On December 28, 1917 H.L. Mencken published an article in the New York Evening Mail titled "A Neglected Anniversary." It described the history of the bathtub in America, noting that people were slow to accept tubs, believing they were dangerous to health. This attitude, Mencken said, changed when President Millard Fillmore became the first president to install a tub in the White House.

Mencken's history of the bathtub was not true. He intended it as a joke, "some harmless fun in war days". However, few people recognized it as such. Details from Mencken's article began to appear in other papers. One scholar included the tale in a history of hygiene.

After eight years, hoping to put a stop to the continued widespread acceptance of his invented tale as true history, Mencken confessed to his hoax in a front-page article in the Chicago Tribune. But his confession did little to stop the tale's spread. If anything, his fake history spread even further. President Truman was known to repeat the story of Millard Fillmore and the bathtub when showing visitors around the White House. To this day, many people still believe that Mencken's fake history of the bathtub is true. More >>>

When the six-volume Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography was published between 1887 and 1889, it was one of the first and most definitive works of its kind in America. It contained biographical information about thousands of people (some famous, some obscure) in American history. It was hailed as a valuable source of information for both scholars and students alike.

But thirty years after the Cyclopedia's publication, questions began to be raised about its reliability. The botanist Dr. John Hendley Barnhart published a brief article in the Journal of the New York Botanical Garden suggesting some of the Cyclopedia's biographical sketches might be fictitious. He had specific doubts about fourteen botanists. He had never heard of these people, nor could he find references to them anywhere else. More >>>

Extracts from the Journal of a "Julius Rodman" appeared in a series of six installments in Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine between January and June 1840. The journal purported to detail a 1792 expedition led by Julius Rodman up the Missouri River toward the Far North. This 1792 expedition, if true, would have made Rodman the first European to cross the Rocky Mountains.

Julius Rodman's expedition was subsequently noted by a member of the U.S. Senate, Robert Greenhow, who wrote in a Senate document, "It is proper to notice here an account of an expedition across the American continent, made between 1791 and 1794, by a party of citizens of the United States, under the direction of Julius Rodman, whose journal has been recently discovered in Virginia, and is now in course of publication in a periodical magazine at Philadelphia."

Rodman was actually a fictitious character invented by Edgar Allan Poe. To create this ruse Poe penned the entire journal, relying heavily on sources such as Washington Irving's Astoria and Lewis and Clark's History of the Expedition to give his account a veneer of authenticity. Poe's motive for perpetrating this elaborate hoax is unclear.

In 1827 a Massachusetts printer named Luther Roby published The Journal Kept by Mr. John Howe while He Was Employed as a British Spy. It told the story of John Howe, a man said to have been a British spy during the Revolutionary war before switching sides to become an American soldier, then a settler, a frontier trader, an Indian preacher, and finally a smuggler.

Howe was long accepted as an actual historical figure. As late as 1976, the historian Robert Gross referred to Howe in The Minutemen and Their World as a "quick-thinking English civilian-spy." The 1983 biographical dictionary American Writers Before 1800 contained an entry about Howe. But the writer of the 1983 biographical entry, Daniel Williams, realized, upon investigation, that Howe was fictitious and exposed the hoax, 165 years after it had been perpetrated.

Williams concluded that Roby (or someone he hired to do the writing) had created the character of Howe based on a real figure, Ensign Henry DeBerniere, who had spied for General Gage. Roby essentially Americanized the character of DeBerniere, making him craftier and more representative of the American ideal of the self-made man. Roby's motive was probably financial. He recognized that readers would be more interested in the adventures of a supposedly real Revolutionary war hero than a fictional one.

In 1782 the Reverend Samuel Peters published (in England) a book titled A General History of Connecticut. The book included sensational details about "blue laws" that had supposedly once existed in Connecticut. (Blue laws are puritanical laws designed to regulate public morality.)

For instance, Peters claimed it had once been against the law in Connecticut to run on Sunday, unless one was going to church. There was also a law that "every male should have his hair cut round, according to a cap." Law breakers could face punishments such as whipping, cutting off of the ears, or even death.

In fact, there was no evidence such laws had ever existed. Peters had made them up. He was a wealthy Anglican who had been forced to leave the country during the American Revolution, and this was apparently his way of getting back at the country that had exiled him, by portraying its people and laws as repressive and fanatical. More >>>

In 1747 word of a major new historical discovery reached England. Charles Bertram (1723-65), a 24-year-old English teacher in Denmark, had found an ancient manuscript and accompanying map, titled De Situ Brittaniae, that detailed the layout of roads and settlements in Roman Britain.

The material caused a buzz of excitement amongst antiquarians because it revealed numerous Roman landmarks whose existence had not been previously known and suggested the existence of an entire unknown Roman province. But in fact, the map and manuscript turned out to be one of the greatest forgeries of the century. More >>>

Crowland Abbey, located deep in the Lincolnshire fens of England, was once a center for medieval religious life. Today, however, it lies mostly in ruins. A few quatrefoil window carvings and undamaged statues provide a sense of the building's former glory, but the abbey itself is less well known for its artwork than it is for an outrageous historical hoax that its former inhabitants once perpetrated. More >>>

The Donation of Constantine was a letter supposedly written by the Roman emperor Constantine (285-337 A.D.) to Pope Sylvester I, granting the Catholic Church ownership of vast territories within the western Roman Empire. For centuries, Popes used the Donation to legitimate the Church’s possession of the papal lands in Italy. The truth was that the Church only officially acquired the papal lands in 756 ad when King Pepin of the Frankish Empire gave them to the Church as a gift. But for almost 700 years, until 1440, the Donation was considered to be authentic. More >>>