Alexander Pope Wrote a 35-Page Takedown of a Historian
CGP Grey5 HN recommenders · 2021–2025
10.3M views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2021-09-09
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.
HN commenters point to it as a masterpiece of humorous archival detective work and a great watch about books and libraries.
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10 comments from Hacker News
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 empathize with one of the sides.
Wait till you find out about "Tiffany" [LINK] (CGP Grey) (spoiler: he couldn't find out where it came from, and did this video on his research to explain more: [VIDEO] )
To 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]
> 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 Business School exam questions. One of my pet peeves is the chain of citations that will inevitably spawn from this. No author can be bothered to go find the original source and just cite that, so this inaccurate (and since retracted) quote will end up propagating itself for decades if not centuries, with each author citing the work that they got the story from. Eventually, hundreds of years from now, someone will be crazy enough to try to work their way down the chain to track down the original, only to discover it isn't there. For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for the original Tiffany: [VIDEO]
> For an excellent and humorous example, see CGP Grey's search for the original Tiffany: [VIDEO] WHAT'S THE JOKE?
It not an easy answer -- if I can cheat a bit and post a second channel that hosts a podcast where I talk about work a lot: [LINK] Some projects end up taking many months unexpectedly, like this one: [VIDEO] Some years are a lot of bad luck, like they one that just passed: [LINK]
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy two videos from CGP Grey: - The Race to Win Staten Island ( [LINK] ) - Someone dead ruined my life... again ( [VIDEO] )
I am recalling CGP Grey's descent into madness due to actually following such trails through historical archives: [VIDEO] Kurzgesagt had something along the same lines: [LINK]
Very cool. If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. [VIDEO]
> If you're interested in things like this you might wanna checkout CGP Grey's videos on tracking down various stories from books through archives. > [VIDEO] The video is sort of funny and reminds me of the paranoiac absurd archival research of the Trystero in Thomas Pynchon's _The Crying of Lot 49_.