As someone who has worked on Straight Dope Staff for many (many!) years, I heartily agree.
Cecil is not, and never has been, trying to write a scholarly paper. His column also is journalistic. He often tries to distill lengthy and complicated issues into (reasonably) easy-to-understand columns, spiced with humor.
His columns are thoroughly fact-checked, believe me. Much more so than Wikipedia. But it would be both counter-productive and boring to put footnotes to references in the column. It’s a syndicated newpaper column, which must have a specific length. Cecil often cites enough references that persons interested in finding the detailed information can look it up on their own.
I’ve read the OP’s posts and I’ve read Cecil’s column. The issue of whether the column is an appropriate source for a research paper aside, I don’t see the OP presenting any facts that Cecil was wrong about. Cecil didn’t say the “crusade” was called by the Pope. He didn’t say that it was made up of children. He acknowledges that the French crusade was mainly fiction. What exactly are you accusing him of getting wrong?
A know that a Crusade had to be blessed by the current pope, but is it true that he had to call for it in the in the first place for it to be official?
I wasn’t aware of that. So if you wish to say “a Crusade didn’t happen”, I guess you’re right. But at the same time, a whole bunch of people undertook a mission to go to the Middle East and try to convert Muslims. That did happen. Sure, they failed, but not before hiking across Europe (and dying in mass lots). And sure, they weren’t exactly children, so that’s a fair criticism.
I still don’t see what Cecil said that is at odds with that.
You are correct, this forum should not be used for an academic paper. However, it would be a useful resource to try to gain insight and leads to other sources.
No, plagiarism is stealing another persons words/work and representing it as your own. Summarizing a bunch of research without citing the sources is merely not scholarly, but says nothing to the contents’ authorship.
No one is suggesting using Cecil’s article as a scholarly reference in this case. There might be some columns that could be considered a useful reference. I’m thinking of ones where he had his staff gather actual data. I recognize getting printed in The Chicago Reader doesn’t quite pass muster of peer review, but it certainly is a useful starting point, especially on those questions that aren’t likely to have much scholarly work to look up.
I meant the column. It’s possible someone is dumb enough to cite a message board thread as a source, but I have trouble imagining that person getting into college.
Yes, but that is something of a retroactive definition, as just what a crusade was and the rules surrounding it were in flux and evolved over time. For example Bohemond of Taranto’s assault on the Byzantine state in 1107-1108 seems to have proceeded with full Papal backing and was in support of the crusading ideal ( technically of course, Bohemond’s own ambitions were undoubtedly the major factor ). Was it a capital “C” Crusade? Perhaps not quite by your definition, but it’s a pretty thin line in this case.
Or witness the eventual extension of the concept of the crusade to embrace launching one against a nominal Latin Christian, as happened with Innocent IV in 1245 ( targeted against the HRE Frederick II ). I suspect its pretty likely Urban II would have been horrified by such an idea.
Of course your definition is the standard one and useful from an academic perspective to provide a framework for approaching a topic. But like most retroactively defined terms ( “feudalism” is another good one ), it leaves room for a fair bit of grey area and potential exceptions.
So you’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean you are entirely right :).
As a sometimes rather average teacher of history, I like to remind students that we shouldn’t be so sure, that history changes at a rapid rate due to new discoveries and sometimes new interpretations, and that we should treat all sources with suspicion.
Here we have a history Ph.D. who makes a number of errors in language, and who thinks that a historian eight hundred years after an event is far more reliable than a historian several hundred years earlier. I make mistakes, so do Ph.D.s.
I’d remind the Ph.D. that none of us was alive at the time, and the academic discipline of history isn’t a very old one. Both academic and popular histories are largely based on hearsay of one sort or another. While he may wish to give special status to Pope-approved Crusades, the term “crusade” came long after the event – in English, not until the 18th Century, when it began to be applied to all sorts of campaigns against a variety of purported evils. So he is relying on an academic convention – nothing more. Finally, the conjecture of historians changes as fast as the lingerie at a Victoria’s Secret show, so we should not confuse fashionable opinions with the meaty facts beneath.
Academics, of course, believe that if they all agree (peer-reviewing each other) that this assures accuracy and therefore demands the obeisance of the masses. Within the closed academic community, the current fashion may be revered dogma. In the real world, it’s academic.