In ninth grade, I had a teacher named Ms. Herrington for a history class called “Eastern Civilizations.” At this point in my life, I was the furthest thing from a history buff or even a history fan, and I struggled to see studying history as interesting. In Ms. Herrington’s class, we studied the Silk Road and the Mongol Empire and that was the first thing in my high school history career that truly piqued my interest—why, I can’t really be sure. I still remember a packet that we had that told stories of Genghis Khan stuffed villagers into carpet bags and running them over with horses (once again, why this fascinated me so much, I’m really not sure). I am definitely looking forward to sending Ms. Herrington a letter at the end of the course when the website is posted and telling her about how I went on to college to serve as the teaching assistant for a large digital humanities project on the Silk Road, an interest that she originally cultivated in my education. Not only that, but I will be traveling 3500 miles along the Silk Road over 3 weeks in January. It’s crazy for me to think that one chapter that I particularly liked in my high school history book is now something that I get to go see and do. I never imagined that my academic career would bring me here, but I am so excited at the opportunity.
 
In class this week, while discussing the Mongol Empire, we talked about how Chinghis Khan holds the reputation of being incredibly violent, which, while true, conflicts with the reality that many towns peacefully surrendered to Chinghis Khan because they had heard about the Mongols by word of mouth. It stuns me that Chinghis Khan may not have actually intended to be a conqueror, but instead kept conquering for fear of retaliation from places he had already defeated. I find it fascinating perhaps the most successful conqueror in history may have done it by chance or convenience, rather than by intense engineering. While this video is aimed at a younger audience than our class, I think it gives a good basic representation of this struggle around Chinghis Khan’s reputation.