This Wednesday, the fellowship of the earth met once again for an illustrious and exciting meeting of the minds. Our powerhouse of a team met for a team meeting to decide how we would move forward with our newly agreed upon topic idea. We decided to break up into three individual tasks that will eventually come together to form the greatest project of all time.  Each member of the project has decided upon a point that they are really excited about and are happy to be working on. Austin will be studying Marco Polo’s travels and taking a critical look at what it means for him to the be the most well known traveler. Sam will be taking a look at other travelers and how their stories relate or clash against the white European narrative of Marco Polo. I myself will be working on looking at the Mongols and the Mongol court and the history they left behind and their records of the places these travelers visited. Ideally when we bring all of our information together we will be able to paint a detailed and beautiful image made up of multiple narratives showing what these travels were really like.
I am really excited to get started on this project, while I am starting to worry there wont be varied  resources to help me on this journey I am incredibly interested in my topic. The mongols interest me greatly and I think that getting to study the history they created and wrote compared to the popular narrative is an opportunity I can’t wait to really get started on. Once again however I am feeling hesitant and a little anxious to the amount of resources I have. My first research steps are going to be in acquiring and looking through the book titled The Secret History of The Mongols. It has been recommended to me numerous times and sounds like the perfect first step for me embarking on this project. My next goal will be searching for research papers written on the secret history of the Mongols, in an attempt to find more sources and detailed analysis.
I must say I am much happier with this project then our original idea as I feel like we can really dig deep on this subject and pull out some new and creative ways of looking at the silk road. The topic is also just incredible to me and  I can’t wait to read over travelers descriptions of their amazing journeys.