Fake News Nation

How rumors, lies, and misrepresentations shaped American history

After the election of Donald Trump as president, people in the United States and across large swaths of Europe, Latin America, and Asia engaged in the most intensive discussion in modern times about falsehoods pronounced by public officials. Fake facts in their various forms have long been present in American life, particularly in its politics, public discourse, and business activities – going back to the time when the country was formed. This book explores the long tradition of fake facts, in their various guises, in American history. It is one of the first historical studies to place the long history of lies and misrepresentation squarely in the middle of American political, business, and science policy rhetoric.

In Fake News Nation, James Cortada and William Aspray present a series of case studies that describe how lies and fake facts were used over the past two centuries in important instances in American history. Cortada and Aspray give readers a perspective on fake facts as they appear today and as they are likely to appear in the future.

Author Biography

James W. Cortada, Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Author of dozens of books on computers, information, and technology, has written for Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, John Wiley & Sons, Financial Times, and McGraw-Hill.

William Aspray, professor of information science, University of Colorado Boulder. Author or editor of more than 25 books on the history of computing, mathematics, and information, has written for such presses as MIT Press, Basic Books, and Springer.