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The Most Dangerous Man in Medieval Studies: An Interview with Peter Konieczny
Peter Konieczny (pronounced Co-nietch-knee) has been a regular presence at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo (“the Zoo”) for nearly two decades. He first began attending the congress in...
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Crusading Against Poor History: An Interview with Dr. Paul Crawford
In 1940, the eminent crusade historian John L. La Monte complained of how, with the possible exception of Renaissance Florence, “no field” of historical research “has been the subject of so much...
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Studying Medieval History and Fighting ISIS?
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina recently announced that her study of medieval history as an undergraduate at Stanford University in the mid-1970s would aid her as a future...
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Professor Thomas Madden on the First Crusade, Jerusalem, and the “Rivers of...
In his entertaining 2012 essay for Revista Chilena de Estudios Medievales, St. Louis University Professor Thomas Madden, perhaps the leading U.S. historian of the crusades, considers the widely...
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Seven Myths of the Crusades: An Interview
Alfred J. Andrea and I recently had the opportunity to do an interview with Medievalists.net focusing on our recent book Seven Myths of the Crusades (Hackett Publishing, 2015). The book has been well...
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A Troubling Analysis of the Recent Pew Poll on ISIS
ISIS is the largest terrorist organization in history, controlling a land mass larger than Britain and ruling over a population of millions in parts of Syria and Iraq. Since ISIS first emerged on the...
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The 99.9% Myth
A number of well-intentioned people, including President Barack Obama, have claimed that the Islamic State and other militant radical groups have practically no support among Muslims. Indeed, in a...
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Top Ten Most Viewed Items for 2015
Looking for some interesting reading? You might try these essays and interviews, which were the ten most viewed items on apholt.com in 2015. It’s been a good year for this little blog. 10. An Interview...
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The Islamic State’s Moral Reasoning on the Sexual Enslavement of Yazidi Women...
I’d recently viewed a widely circulating clip showing Al-Azhar Professor Suad Saleh arguing that, in a legitimate war between Muslims and their enemies, Muslims can capture slave girls and have sex...
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Right Wing Extremism vs. Islamic Extremism in the United States: A Look at...
Recently I have noticed a lot of friends and associates posting articles on social media that claim right wing extremism is more dangerous than Islamic extremism. For many, the claim is surprising, so...
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Africa, Islamic Terrorism, and the West: An Interview with Evans Gumbe
While focusing on terrorism and the rise of the “Islamic State” over the last 18 months, I have spent a lot of time talking with a variety of interesting people with unique perspectives on the issue,...
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Teaching Marines
I recently had one of the more rewarding teaching experiences of my career when I had the opportunity to present two lectures on the background of the so-called “Islamic State” to U.S. Marines from...
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The West, the Muslim World, and Slavery
With the recent institutionalization of slavery in the so-called Islamic State, as well as the troubling and much publicized acknowledgement of the legitimacy of slavery by some modern Islamic scholars...
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The Continuing Importance of the Liberal Arts: An Interview with Dr. Cecilia...
Dartmouth College history professor Cecilia Gaposchkin has had an impressive career as a crusade historian. She is one of the world’s leading historians on the saint and crusading king Louis IX and one...
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Defending Western Civilization: An Interview with Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown
Although slavery has existed since the “dawn of civilization,” Columbia University historian Eric Foner points out that the modern west was the first to abolish it. This was a result, Foner argues, of...
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Al-Azhar and the Islamic State
Al-Azhar University is considered Sunni Islam’s oldest and most distinguished institution of learning. The University was founded c. 1171 in Cairo when the Ayyubids under Salah al-Din overthrew the...
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Anti-Muslim Sentiment in the United States: My Two Cents
Tonight I will participate in a panel discussion considering, primarily, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. The other participants include a Catholic priest, a Rabbi, a historian of 20th...
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Martial Arts in the Age of the War on Terror: An Interview with Master Daniel...
When I was a kid growing up in St. Augustine, I took karate lessons from the great Taekwondo Instructor Ken Durling. Even then, more than thirty years ago, the always kind and soft-spoken Mr. Durling...
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Apology for the Fourth Crusade
Image: Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I with Pope John Paul II. The sack of Constantinople by armies of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 ranks as one of the odder and most lamentable events of the...
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Samuel Huntington’s “Bloody Borders” Revisited
In 1993, in a controversial essay written for Foreign Affairs titled “The Clash of Civilizations,” the influential Harvard University political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (d. 2008) wrote: “In...
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