THE VIDEO SHELF · history of work
Work.
Historia Civilis traces the history of work and time discipline, comparing modern working hours with those of medieval peasants and the changes brought by clocks and industrialization. It draws on works such as Schor's The Overworked American.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN uses it in work-hours and four-day-week threads as the source for the claim that people worked fewer hours before the industrial era.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- Historia Civilis
- Topic
- history of work
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 3
- HN mentions in dataset
- 7
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2023–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Here is an excellent video on the history of work. In short, the Dutch screwed it up for all of us. [0] [0]: [VIDEO]
kolanos on Hacker News · 2025-03
In X’s director of engineering, Haofei Wang, has left the companyJust watched this interesting video comparing how much we work today to medieval times. [VIDEO] TL;DR we work a LOT more hours now than substance farmers did. They worked 4-6 hours a day and only worked about half of the days out of the year.
patmorgan23 on Hacker News · 2023-09
In How a Four-Day Workweek Works, from the Companies Pulling It OffHell, when the industorial revolution happened, working hours increased , not decrease. And especially with electricity, Factory owners forced workers to work deep into the night. A constant 16-hour shift was the norm, so much that it requires legal intervention [1] > In 1833, the …
GreenWatermelon on Hacker News · 2025-05
In Jules: An asynchronous coding agent
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.