Few people today remember that in 1835, men first walked on the moon. That year, however, it was all anyone could talk about. Reports in the Sun, the New York newspaper founded just a couple of years before, described sightings of men with bat wings, unicorns, and bipedal beavers on the moon’s surface, leading to much speculation and vast newspaper sales in New York and in the rest of the relatively new nation. All the city’s papers printed extracts or rebuttals; every outlet had to weigh in. The news of life on the moon spread like riots had the previous year, when mobs of white New Yorkers hit the streets looking for blacks, abolitionists, and “amalgamators”—the name given to those whom they feared were in favor of race-mixing—to intimidate, beat up, or worse.
