THE VIDEO SHELF · literary history
Alexander Pope Wrote a 35-Page Takedown of a Historian
CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN commenters point to it as a masterpiece of humorous archival detective work and a great watch about books and libraries.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- CGP Grey
- Topic
- literary history
- Format
- explainer
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 5
- HN mentions in dataset
- 10
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2021–2025
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.
For a really great video mostly about checking out books from a library watch this: [VIDEO] I found it pretty funny that hundreds of years later he unearthed an old written feud that ended up directly affecting him in a way which caused him to …
fossuser on Hacker News · 2021-12
In Overdue library book returned more than 110 years laterTo see this gloriously realised, check out CGP Grey's description of Pope's feud with Thomas Hearne. Linking the full video because it's a masterpiece [VIDEO]
rozab on Hacker News · 2022-09
In Ask HN: What happened to theregister.com?> This one’s notable in that it puts an entire passage in quotes, but it turns out the passage was not in Cheung (1983) at all—not on page 8 or anywhere else in that article—it actually came from a collection from 1998 of old Harvard …
lolinder on Hacker News · 2022-10
In Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.