Rhodes and President James B. Angell of the University, and by Hon. Peter White, a member of the Council.
Aside from the business meeting, there were six sessions of the Association. One of these was devoted to the inaugural addresses; one was a joint session held with the American Economic Association. Of the remaining four, one was given to the history of the Crusades and of the East, one to the Church History Section, one to Western history, and one was divided between British history and that of the United States.
In the session devoted to the Crusades and the East, the first paper was one which Professor George L. Burr of Cornell University had been requested to prepare, on the Year One Thousand and the Antecedents of the First Crusade, in general review of the modern discussions and the present state of knowledge. This paper appears as the next article to this, in the present number of this Review. After it, Professor Oliver J. Thatcher of the University of Chicago read a carefully prepared and instructive survey of the modern Critical Work on the Sources for the First Crusade. Beginning with Ranke's seminary of 1837 and Sybel's book of 1841, he traced the history of the discussion, and described the Latin sources of the first rank—the letters of the crusaders and the eye-witness accounts by the anonymous Italian, Raymond of Agiles, Fulcher of Chartres, and Tudebod—and those of the second rank, coming from writers who, like Ekkehard and Radulf, went out to the Holy Land soon after the date of this crusade. He then gave a brief account of the ways in which the modern process of shifting emphasis from the secondary to the primary sources has reconstituted our narrative of the First Crusade—the relegating of Peter the Hermit to the background, the exalting of Pope Urban, the partial discrediting of the leaders—and of the causes which had brought about the original distortion.
President Angell of the University of Michigan, formerly ambassador to Turkey, read the paper upon the Capitulations in Turkey which appeared in our last issue (pp. 254-259). In discussion of Dr. Thatcher's paper. Professor Archibald C. Coolidge of Harvard University dwelt especially upon the important relations of the Crusades to the Eastern Church and Empire and to Asiatic history in general, and upon the Byzantine sources for their history. Dr. Alfred L. P. Dennis, instructor at Harvard, by request described, both with respect to the Crusades and in more general aspects, the Oriental portion of the library of the late Count Riant. This half of his collections has been presented to the library of Harvard University, while the Scandinavian section has been presented to Yale.
