My name is James Naus and I'm an Associate Professor of history here at Oakland.
I'm also the chair of the history department here at Oakland.
My research specialization is in medieval Europe generally and specifically on the crusading movement.
Which is why I'm
connected to the Riley-Smith project here at Oakland.
Jonathan Riley-Smith was was the most important historian of the crusading movement.
Arguably over the
last hundred years. What makes him such an important historian
is the work that
he produced. To put it sort of in it's
simplest terms, he reintroduced the idea of religion into how we understand the crusades.
Until the 1980s and 1990s
when he began questioning why people
were driven to participate in these the
idea that people were motivated by
religion was something that hadn't
thought about by scholars for the better
part of a couple of centuries.
In terms of where the materials can be found the bulk of the secondary materials are found in Kresge Library room 224.
That's the room we're sitting in now. There's also a significant materials that perhaps
because  of their rarity or their age are kept downstairs in Kresge library in the archives.
Those are also open to
students and scholars to work with
you just need to work under slightly
different conditions.
There's also considerable non-book holdings as part of the collection there are most notably
several thousand slides from various
Crusader sites in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon.
Which Riley Smith took throughout his life and some of these are highly significant because many of
those sites, as students are going
through and cataloging those slides,
are finding that many of those sites are
actually ones that have been  recently destroyed in the last five years in the fighting especially in Syria.
I think the thing
that makes this collection particularly
important to have here Oakland is that
there are very few places in the world
that would have such a condensed and
curated collection dealing with one
topic like the Crusades. And so as a
consequence of that it will basically
draw scholars from around the world to
 Oakland to want to use this.
