Information Literacy: Annotated Bibliography - Essay Example

It also gives a good overview of the kinds of materials used by medieval historians, the kind of conclusions that they can draw, and includes an excellent bibliography for further reading, which includes a great number of books on the crusades. This book is primarily useful as a general reference tool and a gateway for further reading, without necessarily being something that would be directly cited in a research essay. It also provides context so that the crusades can be better understood in their political and social milieu, something lacking from other sources.

This is a newspaper article that was published shortly after the events of September 11th, which were a major part of why the world has renewed interest in the Crusades and in the politics of Islamic-Christian or Arab-Western conflict generally. It reports on the language being used by then President George W. Bush about the opening of the war on terror, and demonstrates that the rhetorical tools used during the crusading era were being used again in the war on terror and argues that this is a negative turn of events, harkening back to what it calls one of the darkest times in Western History.

This article is useful on several fronts: firstly, it serves as a primary source example of the way the crusades are usually imagined today, that is, as a sort of proto-colonial endeavour that the West must feel guilty about and atone for. It also shows that the media do not always report accurately on the subject of the crusades. This article, for instance, quotes the numbers of Muslims and Jews killed during the sack of Jerusalem directly from medieval sources, without recognizing, as an historian would, that those numbers are certainly inflated (perhaps by as much as an order of magnitude). Burns, R.I (1971).

Christian-Islamic Confrontation in the West: The Thirteenth-Century Dream of Conversion The American Historical Review, 76, 1386-1434. Retrieved from