The object is a pair of Mongolian stirrups found in the Mongolian collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They are important for what they represent, the conquest of a vast and incredibly influential empire on horseback.

Citations:

Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

“Concerning the Tartar Customs of War,” in The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Addition 1 (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), 260.

Craughwell, Thomas J. The Rise and Fall of the Second Largest Empire in History: How Genghis Khan’s Mongols Almost Conquered the World. Massachusetts: Quayside Publishing Group, 2010.

Rossabi, Morris. The Mongols and Global History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011.

Music:

“I can go the Distance” from Disney’s Hercules, instrumental version, 1997. Composed by Alan Menken, lyrics by David Zippel.

Having been in England during the centennial of the start of the First World War, I know that I find public memory and war, especially WWI, to be of particular interest. I also think it is important to understand the profound effects that a war such as this had on the societies involved. Studying the ways in which these wars are remembered today can broaden that understanding. Coming from an American education, the war doesn’t sit in our memories in the same way that it does in Europe, and I think it is important to learn and understand that when discussing the world wars (especially the first). For these reasons, I thought a book on World War I and memory would be beneficial for the class in terms of understanding the first world war and its impact. To find such a book, I looked up ‘The Great War memory’ and scrolled through until The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell caught my eye. It was of interest to me because the title seemed to be exactly what I was hoping to find and it could be found in the lower section of the library, which I like because it smells like old books down there. There were not a lot of books on World War I surrounding this one, but there were several by the same author. One of which, titled Abroad, seemed particularly interesting. It was about the ways in which literature travelled throughout societies during times of war. As for The Great War and Modern Memory, I flipped through and was fascinated by the topic. The beginning seemed to be a general outline of the war and the new methodologies it required. The rest was was concerned with literary aspects of the war, and each section was marked by one of these aspects. Basically the book discusses that World War I changed society in profound and unprecedented ways. There had never been a war like this before, and there had never been a need for language to describe the horrors, violence, and overwhelming shock and grief that the war brought. There was therefore a lack of willingness and ability to put these experiences into words, and Fussell details the ways in which this was handled. One of his sections is on satire, as humor was often used as a way to deal with these new horrors and experiences. Another is on theater and war, as imagery of the theater was often used by soldiers to describe their experiences. Basically, World War I profoundly changed the way the world was viewed, and Fussell uses changes in language and its to analyze this.

Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975.

To search for a book for this assignment, I first considered what type of book or subject I might find relevant to the course. I settled on something about the Mongols, as we talk about them and compare them to other empires, but haven’t discussed much specifically about them. I therefore think a book about the Mongol Empire in terms of their conquering and ruling strategies might be compelling for class discussion. To find such a book, I searched ‘Mongol Empire’ on the library website and went to the shelf where the majority of the books were located, knowing that there would probably be something that caught my eye in this location. Mongol Imperialism by Thomas T. Allsen caught my eye, mainly due to the title. In flipping through the book, I discovered that Allsen lays out his argument pretty clearly in the introduction and that the book seems to be about the conquering strategies of the Mongols as well as the ways in which they were able to utilize and mobilize their various resources in order to create the largest contiguous land empire in human history. He even makes specific reference to their interactions with the people of China and Russia, areas on which we are currently focused. I thought this would therefore give a nice overview of Mongol rule to which the empires we discuss in class are so often compared. Adjacent to the book were several other resources of interest, including a primary source: The Secret History of the Mongols.

Allsen, Thomas T. Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands, 1251-1259. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987.