Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Medieval history professor Matthew Gabriele, of Virginia Tech, has published a powerful new article about the word “crusade” in both its modern and medieval contexts. He’s arguing not just that modern people mis-use Crusade, which they do (he digs into the famous W. Bush quote about a ‘Crusade against Evil’), but that medievalists need to …
Modern xenophobic Europeans have adopted medieval crusader imagery for their cause. As a medievalist, and more specifically a historian focused on imagination, memory, narrative creation, myth, and political culture focused around medieval crusading, I find this at once worrying and fascinating. Fascinating because it replicates many of the medieval processes by which crusading became a …
An Islamophobic hate-rally was held in Prague last weekend, featuring Neo-Nazi songs, chants of “Burn down all the mosques,” and, interestingly to me, people in Crusader costumes. Here’s some images: Dressed as Crusaders to hear Neo-Nazi singer: Czechs march for president, against refugees https://t.co/cqKpMRIQuQ pic.twitter.com/thQhKrDOtw — Andrew Stroehlein (@astroehlein) December 16, 2015 So this is a …
Thomas Madden, one of my mentors, has a new piece in the Washington Post on ISIS and the Crusades. In it, he rehearses the ways in which the memory of the Crusades was carried by Western European people into the colonial era and thus brought the European ideas about the Crusades into the Islamic world. Modern …
In an earlier post, I talked about crusades and memory, linking to my Guardian piece and talking about the meaning of the violence linked to Crusading. I suggested that historians might debate whether a given battle or moment of violence happened, or whether it happened because of religious hatred for “the other,” versus some other …
In a recent New Yorker piece on the late SEAL sniper Chris Kyle, Nicholas Schmidle writes, Like many soldiers, Kyle was deeply religious and saw the Iraq War through that prism. He tattooed one of his arms with a red crusader’s cross, wanting “everyone to know I was a Christian.” When he learned that insurgents …