Long before viral hoaxes and deep fakes, there was the Cardiff Giant — a ten-foot stone "man" unearthed from a New York farm that had people lining up (and paying admission) to gawk at what they believed was a biblical relic or a fossilized ancient. It was neither. It was gypsum, a con man's imagination, and America's gift for believing exactly what it wants to. We dig into the hoax, the man behind it, and the P.T. Barnum plot twist you didn't see coming.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-cardiff-giant-one-of-historys-most-famous-hoaxes-72691312/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cardiff-Giant
https://www.history.com/articles/cardiff-giant-hoax
https://www.nysm.nysed.gov/exhibitions/ongoing/cardiff-giant
https://archive.org/details/cardiffgiant00newy
https://books.google.com/books?id=Qb4DAAAAYAAJ (contemporary 19th-century accounts)
https://www.loc.gov/collections/chronicling-america/ (period newspaper coverage)
History: The Cardiff Giant Fools the Nation, 145 Years Ago.
Live Science: Cardiff Giant: "America's Biggest Hoax."
JSTOR Daily: The Cardiff Giant: The Biggest Hoax of the 19th Century.
Central New York History: Today in History: The Cardiff Giant.