How do you detect and avoid a hoax? It’s difficult, and the better the hoax the tougher it is to detect. There is not a single “answer” or “trick” or “secret.”

A magician writing in a Cold-War era manual for international spies explained that “practically every popularly held opinion on how to deceive, as […]

Hoaxes come in all shapes and sizes, but they employ the same basic elements—a perpetrator (with a motive), a target constituency (with an unmet desire), and a fabrication (with a provenance). Hoaxes also follow a common lifecycle—they play off their setting, are introduced or “discovered,” grow through comment and debate, and then endure or fade […]

The discipline of history has much to offer our present age of misinformation in terms of subject matter and analytical methods.

Each day, from March 15-21, I’ll share information and resources from the class I taught last fall at the University of Utah on “Hoaxes and History.”

Look forward to information such as . . .

Why I taught my students […]