The Martians by David Barron

Subtitled: the true story of an alien craze that captured turn-of-the-century America. In this captivating and vivid history, journalist Baron recreates the mania for Mars that gripped America over a century ago. He recaps heated debates between eccentric intellectuals over the existence of intelligent life on the planet—indicated in the minds of some by straight lines, interpreted as canals, observed crisscrossing its surface. The most prominent of these “battling egos” was Percival Lowell, a Boston heir who established his own observatory; he theorized that Mars’s canals were an irrigation system preserving a dying planet. Alongside H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Nikola Tesla’s claim to have intercepted an extraterrestrial communication, Lowell’s fantastical lectures depicting “the pathos and heroism of this great civilization fighting to survive” sparked a Mars craze. Baron astutely examines the societal shifts that account for the Martian fixation, among them the rise of a yellow press that craved sensationalistic stories, a new wave of exploration and invention (the Wright brothers’ flights; expeditions to the North Pole), and divisive earthbound struggles like the Spanish-American War that rendered Mars—an imagined “Planet of Peace”—as a symbol of hope. While Baron points to the dangers of conspiracy theories and bunk science, he also presents the saga as one of infectious optimism that inspired subsequent generations of science fiction writers and scientists. It’s an enthrallingly bizarre and surprisingly poignant account of humankind’s limitless willingness to believe.
7 copies in the library system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbDv9RXqqfY 47 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GicT79H8Ws 32 min audio only
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwmlXpAk-g 51 min audio only