A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America

Scott Tribble's A Colossal Hoax, The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America, published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2009, is a book length history of the 1869 Cardiff Giant hoax, tracing tobacconist George Hull's manufacture of the buried stone giant and its exploitation of contemporary biblical literalist belief in the verse there were giants in the earth in those days. Its strength is that sustained narrative treatment lets the book trace motive, manufacture and reception together, showing exactly how a fabricated find was staged to exploit a real controversy of its day between biblical literalism and Darwinian science. Its limit is that it is a popular narrative history rather than a specialist academic monograph, written for a general readership, so its citations and archival grounding, while adequate for the outline of the hoax, are lighter than a peer reviewed study would carry; a claim resting on a specific archival document behind the story benefits from checking Tribble's own sourcing.