Sourcing—the act of understanding who wrote a document, where they wrote it, and why they wrote it, for the purposes of analysis or interpretation—is integral to the work of a historian. Without properly understanding an author’s purpose and perspective, it’s difficult to properly interpret a document. In this first activity on sourcing, you’ll learn how an author has framed that event, and how that then impacts your interpretation of it.

Reading, claim testing
It’s nearly impossible to source something without reading it first. Not all sources are based on text, so in this course we consider reading more broadly and include video, artifacts, infographics, photographs, art, and other data representations all part of reading. In order to adequately make sense of a source, it’s important to understand the author, their background, and how this might have impacted what they produced. This connects to one of our claim testers—authority. Understanding what kind of authority the author has helps us interpret their point of view and also assists us in determining if their account is credible or trustworthy.

In this activity, you’re going to read a collection of documents related to a high school located in Anytown, USA, that recently changed its off-campus lunch policy. As you can probably imagine, changing a school policy such as this one garnered a lot of reactions from both the local and school community.

Everyone—from the administration, to students, to local business owners—had an opinion about this change. Now, you are being asked to examine everyone’s reactions to this policy change to determine why this was such a significant moment in time. This is something historians do all the time to understand the past: they look at the past from different people’s perspectives to understand the historical importance of that event. This is typically referred to as sourcing.

You will source documents throughout the course, something that is not easy to do. Sourcing can be hard because sometimes people have to interpret old documents that are written in less-modern English, or that are translated from other languages. As part of sourcing work, you’ll also be asked to look at images and other types of documents to try to interpret the creator’s intention. Because this can be tricky, we’ve created a tool you can use to help you source documents. Review the Sourcing Tool, which is included in the Sourcing—Introduction worksheet, with your class. One way to remember what to think about when sourcing is by using the acronym HAPPY. Review each section of the tool with your class and be sure to pay attention to the questions being asked in each section.

Once you’ve reviewed the tool, you’re going to learn more about it by using it to review some source documents from when the off-campus lunch policy change took place.

Get into groups of four and look at the excerpts, also included in the worksheet. Each person in your group should pick one excerpt to read and then share about with the rest of the group. Then, decide which document is the best fit for each of the first four sourcing categories of HAPPY: historical context (H), audience (A), purpose (P), and point of view (P). Be sure you can explain your category decisions and be prepared to share your answers with the class.

Once you’ve discussed the documents as a class, pick out one of the sources and answer the questions in the WhY (Importance) row of the Sourcing Tool. Hand in your answers to your teacher before leaving class.

Afro-Eurasia is a big place, and in the period from 1200 to 1450, it contained many different forms of communities. The largest states were generally clustered along the fertile belt of land stretching from West Africa and the Mediterranean to East Asia. Yet, plenty of other states formed in the areas to the north and south of this belt. This article provides an introduction to this rich tapestry of states and other types of human communities in this period. During this period, the great Mongol Empire united a vast swath of these communities under a single state.

The Unit 2 Problem asks you to consider how connections among communities changed the many different societies that existed from 1200 to 1450. This article provides an overview of the many different communities that you’ll meet in this unit. It provides you with evidence to support, extend, and challenge the communities frame narrative. It also introduces the concept of “the state” as a way of organizing human communities.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. According to the author, why do we need rules and institutions to organize large groups of people?
2. How does the author define a state?
3. During this period in Afro-Eurasia, where were most of the large states located?
4. What is Dar al-Islam, and what was its significance during this period?
5. What was the largest and most sophisticated state at the start of this era? What strategies made this state so powerful?
6. What innovations did the Mongol Empire produce? How did the empire shape the future of Eurasia?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following question:

1. The author mentions that most states in Afro-Eurasia clustered along a belt of land. Thinking about the three frames of this course, what are some possible explanations you can come up with to explain why large states formed in this belt?

You might be familiar with the phrase “separation of church and state.” Yet, historically, belief and government have usually worked together to organize communities. In the period from 1200 to 1450, belief systems provided ways of understanding the world, and states provided laws and distributed resources. Despite their different functions in theory, in practice, the lines between state and belief were often quite blurry. This article provides an overview of how states and religions have worked together and sometimes clashed across the diverse societies of Afro-Eurasia in this period.

By this point, you have been introduced to the idea of “the state.” This article is meant to deepen that understanding by introducing the role of belief in the ways that humans have organized their societies. The Unit 2 Problem asks you to consider how linkages changed the various communities of this era. Many of the world’s largest religions, like Buddhism and Islam, spread over vast distances, connecting diverse peoples and states. As such, this article provides evidence to respond to the unit problem and evaluate the communities and networks frame narratives.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. How does the author describe states and religion in the Islamic world?
2. How were Buddhism and Hinduism different?
3. Why did Buddhism and Daoism often prove troublesome for the Chinese state? What did the Song dynasty promote instead and why?
4. What are some ways that rulers and religious leaders cooperated and clashed in Christian Europe?
5. The Mongol Empire conquered people of many different religions across Eurasia? How did the Mongol state treat these conquered peoples?

Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following question:

1. It’s been a while since the fifteenth century, but religions still play a major role in our world today. Sometimes they’re involved in government, sometimes they are supposed to be separate. Can you think of any ways that the history in this article might have influenced the ways we think of religion in the twenty-first century?

Islam is practiced by nearly 2 billion people—that’s 1 in 4 people on the planet. It emerged in the seventh century, when Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad received revelation from God, which was compiled into the Holy Qur’an. Islam spread rapidly after the Prophet’s death, mostly through the expansion Muslim-ruled empires. However, traveling merchants and mystics continued to spread Islam beyond these conquests in the centuries that followed. Today, Muslims and historians alike continue to think about the history of early Islam by studying the Qur’an and accounts about the Prophet and his companions called Hadith.

This video will give you a brief overview of Islamic beliefs and focuses on the early history of Islam. This history will help you to evaluate the many different narratives about Islam, which come from both Muslim and non-Muslim sources. This historical context is key for testing different claims about Islam’s origins, beliefs, and political history. This will also help you contextualize future lessons about empires, trade networks, and religion in the Islamic world.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. According to the Islamic faith, who received messages from God?
2. What are the five pillars of Islam?
3. What are Hadith?
4. How far did Islam expand in the first century after the death of the Prophet? How was this expansion achieved?
5. How did Islam spread from 750 to 1700?
6. What do most historians agree on about early Islam?
7. What are important sources of Islamic history for Muslims?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. Why do you think understanding Islamic history is important for practicing Muslims? In what aspects of your life is understanding history important for your own activities?
2. In this video, Nate Bowling talked about different narratives about Islam that may be politically motivated. Can you think of a politically-motivated narrative about a religion that you have heard? Do you think this narrative is credible? Why or why not?

You have been introduced to the historical thinking practice of contextualization, and now you’ll deepen your understanding of this practice by considering the conditions that existed that allowed Mansa Musa to embark on a 3,000-mile journey in the fourteenth century. This will help you learn that context may not just be about the events of the historical time (a common misconception) but that context can involve other factors and underlying causes.

Causation, reading
You’ll use your causation skills to examine the time period in which Mansa Musa lived and traveled and determine what historical events or processes allowed for his wealth and his journey from Mali to Mecca. In addition, you’ll use your close-reading skills to pull out the necessary information from the video and primary source excerpt.

In this activity, you’ll watch the Crash Course World History video about Mansa Musa and read the primary source excerpt to pull out information about Mansa Musa and his travels. You’ll use this background information along with the event cards to complete the Contextualization Tool.

First, a thought experiment:

Imagine that you live in Los Angeles, California, and you want to take a once-in-a-lifetime road trip to Disney World in Florida. Oh, and along the way, you want to pick up your best friend, who lives in Chicago. So, what do you need to make road trip, which is more than 3,000 miles? You want to travel in style, so you buy a Tesla Model X SUV. In fact, you have so much style, you buy 80 of them just to haul your stuff. And you also have an entourage of 12,000 people to help you along the way! Expensive trip, right? No worries—you happen to be the richest person who ever lived, worth about $400,000,000,000. No, that’s not a typo: that’s FOUR HUNDRED BILLION dollars! If you were a country, you would be twenty-eighth in terms of GDP (gross domestic product) all by yourself. That would put you ahead of countries like Norway, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore. How’s that for some contextualization! We won’t even talk about the impact your spending spree had on Chicago—it was LEGENDARY! Fun to imagine, isn’t it? But the truth is, Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, made a trip just like this in the early fourteenth century. How was such a thing possible?

After reading through the paragraph above, your teacher will either hand out or have you download the Contextualization – Mansa Musa worksheet. Then, as a class you’ll watch Crash Course World History: Mansa Musa and Islam in Africa. As you watch the video, take brief notes on the life of Mansa Musa, including information about his reign, his faith, and his travels. Next, you’ll read the primary source excerpt that is included in the worksheet with your class. As you read or listen, think about the geographic and cultural factors that enabled Mansa Musa to embark on his journey.

Then, using your notes from the video and reading, you’ll work together in small groups to complete the Contextualization Tool (included in the Contextualization—Mansa Musa worksheet). First, write the date and location of the historical event, and then divide the event cards into two groups: broad and narrow context. You’ll share your broad and narrow contexts with the class by placing your event cards on the funnel on the board. Be sure to share your reasons for categorizing your event cards as broad or narrow context. You are allowed to move any event cards that you think were placed incorrectly by the prior group, but you must provide justification for doing that. After your group has moved any of the previous group’s event cards, you can place two of your event cards that are not already up on the funnel, and explain your reasoning to the class. Then, return to your group to answer the remaining questions on the tool.

Finally, you’ll have a class discussion about the geographic and cultural context that enabled Mansa Musa to embark on his journey.

Your teacher will collect your worksheets and use them to assess how your contextualization skills are progressing.

The growth of trade routes and exchange in Afro-Eurasia helped to stimulate the development of additional states in several parts of Africa. Many of these states were tied to Islamic trading networks, and they combined local political ideas with thoughts and technologies coming from other parts of the Islamic World. Some states, like Mali and the city-states of east Africa, had a huge impact on those growing trading networks.

The recovery of Afro-Eurasian trade and networks of exchange that accompanied the growth of the Caliphate helped to draw together many parts of the world. African states and societies played a large role in this network, and provide evidence to answer the Unit 2 Problem: "How did networks of exchange connect societies, and how were communities changed by these connections?" In addition, studying varieties of African political structures in this period can help us evaluate the communities frame narrative for this era.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. John Green points out that most sub-Saharan African histories were preserved by oral tradition rather than written down. He also says there is a prejudice against oral tradition. What evidence does he use to argue that oral tradition is in fact important?
2. Who was Mansa Musa, and why was his hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca) so significant?
3. What was Mali like when Mansa Musa ruled it, in terms of both politics and religion?
4. What kinds of states were built along the eastern coast of Africa at this time, and how were they linked?
5. For a long time, scholars incorrectly believed the Swahili city-states in east Africa must have been founded by Arabs, rather than local Africans. Why did they believe that, according to John Green?
6. What kinds of goods and other resources were traded through the Swahili city-states?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. Why do you think two different kinds of states formed in different African regions (large empires in the interior of west Africa and city-states along the coast of east Africa)?
2. How is Ibn Battuta’s life evidence of the Islamic World as a network?

After 1206, the Mongol Empire launched a series of invasions that saw their empire expand across Eurasia, from Korea to Hungary. But how did they manage to conquer and then rule such a vast empire? This article explores the tools and strategies the Mongols had at their disposal. It concludes that innovative and tolerant administration was as critical to Mongol success as were swords, horses, and the great Genghis Khan.

The central question of Unit 2 asks you to explain how networks connected different societies and how new connections transformed communities. Few groups connected the world more than the Mongol Empire. Their conquests—and the 150 years of rule that followed—connected much of Afro-Eurasia under one state. Even areas that escaped Mongol conquest nonetheless found themselves drawn closer into a web of trade networks that expanded under Mongol rule. This article thus provides evidence to respond to the Unit Problem and to evaluate the networks and communities frame narratives for this unit.

Think about the following question as you read the article: How does the Mongol Empire represent a significant change from other empires you’ve learned about thus far in the course? What were some of the continuities you noticed between the Mongol Empire and other empires? Write this question at the top of the Three Close Reads worksheet. You will be asked to respond to this question again after the third read in the Evaluating and Corroborating section of the worksheet.

Read 1—Skimming for Gist

Fill out the Skimming for Gist section of the Three Close Reads worksheet as you complete your first close read. As a reminder, this should be a quick process!

Read 2—Understanding Content

For this reading, you should be looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the major claim and key supporting details, and analysis and evidence. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Why was the Mongol Empire important?
2. This article approaches the question of why the Mongol conquests succeeded as a murder mystery. What factors contributed to the Mongol Empire’s success?
3. How did Mongol rule help increase trade in Afro-Eurasia?
4. What role did scholars and technology play in the Mongol Empire?
5. Does this article conclude that the Mongols were good or bad?

Read 3—Evaluating and Corroborating

At the end of the third close read, respond to the following questions:

1. How does the Mongol Empire represent a significant change from other empires you’ve learned about thus far in the course? What were some of the continuities you noticed between the Mongol Empire and other empires?
2. You’ve encountered a diverse tapestry of communities across Afro-Eurasia in this unit. How does the story of the Mongol Empire support, extend, or challenge the narratives you’ve encountered so far?
3. The author of this article concludes with a “both sides” view of the legacy of the Mongol Empire. What do you think? Can you take a side? Do you think the Mongols were a positive or negative force for the societies they encountered? What evidence from this article supports your opinion? What challenges it?

When we think of the Mongol Empire, we often think of men—soldiers on horseback and mighty emperors. Yet, women played an important political role in the creation, preservation, and eventually, the division of the empire. Many royal women used their extensive family ties to exert influence over the empire. Sorqoqtani Beki was one such Mongol woman who used her family relationships and a network of sister-princesses to seize power for her son. In the process, she made an agreement with her nephew that started the division of the empire.

The Mongol Empire reshaped Eurasia, and understanding its organization gives us insight into how trade and politics worked across this vast region. Two conflicting narratives of the Mongols see them as either great administrators or vicious warriors. Both narratives are usually built on evidence surrounding the work of male leaders. However, royal women played a vital role in building alliances, connecting families, and competing for power. The story of Sorqoqtani Beki provides you with evidence to challenge some of the standard narratives about Mongol communities and networks.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Who was Sorqoqtani Beki and what was her relationship to the Mongol royal family?
2. What was the cause of Sorqoqtani’s conflict with Oghul-Qaimish?
3. How and why did Sorqoqtani win this conflict?
4. Sorqoqtani’s nephew Batu agreed to support her. What did he get in return, and what was the eventual result?
5. How does the artist use art and design to demonstrate the ways in which competition between women, and their support for each other, helped determine Mongol politics?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. How does this biography of Sorqoqtani Beki support, extend, or challenge what you have learned about the Mongols?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

There are many different stories people tell about the Mongols. These stories are partially true, but also incomplete. While the Mongols were brutal at times and were tough, mobile warriors, they were also incredibly adaptive, tolerant, egalitarian, and creative. With some clever political organization and some quick adaptations along the way, the Mongols were able to build a massive empire. While it didn’t last very long as a unified empire, it certainly had long-lasting effects.

In Unit 2, we look at two world systems of trade and exchange. The first of these, at least for Afro-Eurasia, centered on the empire created by the Mongols, who are introduced through this video. In it, you’ll find evidence you can use to contest, support, or extend all three of the course frames. The Mongols are sometimes described as an exception in all three cases. This video introduces evidence to support these claims. You’ll also have the opportunity to evaluate causal arguments, like the argument that Mongols caused trade to expand and therefore caused the plague to spread. Together, these things will help you think through the Unit 2 Problem.

Preview – Skimming for Gist

As a reminder, open and skim the transcript, and read the questions before you watch the video.

Key Ideas – Understanding Content

Think about the following questions as you watch this video:

1. How did Mongol migratory patterns affect their production and distribution?
2. Why, according to John Green were Mongols generally more egalitarian than many other societies?
3. Which policies did Genghis Khan use to unite the Mongol confederation?
4. How did adaptability help the Mongols build their empire? Please give at least two examples.
5. How did the Mongol Empire affect trade and exchange across Eurasia (and even parts of Africa)?
6. What was the Yam System?
7. How did the Mongols recruit people to work for them? What world-historical effect did this have?
8. What did the Mongols have to do with the Black Death?

Evaluating and Corroborating

1. How does evidence from this video contest, support, or extend the networks frame narrative you have been given?

3x5 note cards or cut up paper

Throughout the WHP course, you’ll encounter a variety of primary source collections that give you multiple chances to practice applying your sourcing skills. While the WHP course has a practice progression devoted entirely to sourcing, those activities are detailed and ask you to engage in thorough sourcing related to historical context, audience, purpose, point of view, and overall significance for a specific document. That kind of in-depth sourcing is a vital skill, but in certain situations, you’ll need to be able to source more quickly. To meet this need, you’ll use the WHP Quick-Sourcing Tool for the sourcing collections. The Quick Source Tool and the process for using it—specifically designed for unpacking document collections—is introduced here and will help you be successful when responding to document-based questions (DBQs).

This activity introduces you to the Quick-Sourcing Tool and the first sourcing collection in the course. You can use the same Quick Sourcing process any time you encounter a sourcing collection and want to quickly look at the set of sources in response to a prompt or question, as opposed to the deeper analysis you will do when using the HAPPY tool that is part of the sourcing progression.

First, take out or download Primary Sources—Mongol Collection. Each collection has a guiding question. You can find this question on the first page of each source in the collection. You’ll be doing the prewriting work needed to respond to the question, and you’ll use a tool to help you critically examine the sources in light of that goal. Download or take out the Quick-Sourcing Tool and read through the directions. The left side, Individual Sources, gives you a process for discovering what each individual document means and how it relates to the guiding question. The right side of the table, Sourcing Collection, has you thinking about the sourcing collection as a set, and has you consider how you might group or bucket each document as a strategy for supporting your claims with evidence.

Next, your teacher will model how to examine each of the documents in the sourcing collection. Take out note cards so you can record information about each source as you work through the tool. Then, look at the first document in the collection, and as a class, in Part 1 of the tool write a quick summary of the source in terms of how it relates to the guiding question. Then, move on to Part 2, which uses the first four letters of the acronym from the HAPPY tool. You should include the historical significance or “why” (the “Y” in “HAPPY”) for any of the four questions you choose to respond to. Finally, for Part 3, gather the evidence you found in each document and add it to your note card so you can include it in a response later without having to go back to the document. Once you’ve quickly analyzed each document, you’re ready to move to the Sourcing Collection side of the table. Look at your note cards and try to sort the cards into categories. There might be a group of documents that support the claim you want to make in your response, and there might be some that will help you consider counterclaims, for example. Try to find some groupings that help you respond to the question.

Once you’ve finished sourcing and grouping the documents, your teacher may have you answer the guiding question in small groups. Over time, this process will get faster and easier, and you likely won’t even need the tool anymore!

Across these sources, we hear about the mysterious Mongols—or the Tatars/Tartars, as they are often called. Both Muslim and Christian sources speak of the Mongols in terms of a calamity or punishment in the earliest sources, while later sources are often more sympathetic—either because they are written from the heart of the empire or because of other political reasons. Some are full of hyperbole (exaggeration), while others present a more measured approach to the early history of the Mongols. Additionally, later sources talk of the recovery of urban areas after the Mongols establish a more permanent presence, describing robust trade networks and tight-knit communities. Because this collection focuses on the establishment of the empire, most of the sources are from the thirteenth century, with a few from later periods. This allows readers to track continuities and shifts not only in the history of the Mongol Empire but in changing attitudes about the Mongols across Eurasia.

The Mongol people, and rulers, created a vast empire that spanned Eurasia. What we know about them, especially in the early years of their empires, often comes from their neighbors. Can we use these sources to figure out what Mongol society was like? Or are their authors too prejudiced by their own views and needs to be really useful? You will explore a variety of sources, from a variety of authors, both to learn about the Mongols, as well as to practice your sourcing skills.

We recommend using the accompanying Quick Sourcing activity (above) to help you analyze these sources.

One of the most powerful advisers of the Ilkhan Ghazan (r.1295–1304), Rashid al-Din wrote one of the first histories of the world in order to establish the power of his patron. The history aimed to justify and support the rule of the Ilkhan over a diverse empire. This book, the Jami’ al-Tawarikh, is viewed as a monumental intellectual work.

What are the consequences of a connected world? Afro-Eurasia was crisscrossed by networks in the period c.1200-1450, and never more so than when the Mongols ruled the central region. These connections led to a great cultural flowering as ideas and art moved back and forth. Rashid al-Din was an advisor of the Mongol Ilkhan Ghazan. In the late thirteenth century, he was asked to produce a history of the world. That history tells us a lot about the power of the Ilkhan, but also the way in which his state brought together culture from across a vast region.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Who was Rashid al-Din?
2. According to the author, what was the difficulty of ruling the Ilkhanate?
3. What does the quote from Rashid al-Din’s book, shown in the top panel, tell us?
4. How does the artwork in the Jami’i al-Tawarikh demonstrate this diversity?
5. How did the artist of this biography try to demonstrate the connections of the Ilkhanate to other regions in the top panel?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. How does this biography of Rashid al-Din support, extend, or challenge what you have learned about connections and networks in Mongol society and in this era?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!

One of the most influential poets in history, Rumi lived a life and preached a philosophy that transcended borders. He believed that universal love—expressed in poetry, dance, and music—was a path to God. His poetry and teachings rejected divisions based on ethnicity and religion.

The biography of Rumi serves three purposes. First, it can help students to question what they believe they know about Islam, a particularly important comprehension for this era. Second, it demonstrates the significance of poets and creators of art in history, alongside rulers and military leaders. Finally, Rumi reflects the long history of cosmopolitans, globalists, and internationalists in world history. Their ideas of universal love and anti-xenophobia go back much further than many students may know.

Read 1: Observe

As you read this graphic biography for the first time, review the Read 1: Observe section of your Three Close Reads for Graphic Bios Tool. Be sure to record one question in the thought bubble on the top-right. You don’t need to write anything else down. However, if you’d like to record your observations, feel free to do so on scrap paper.

Read 2: Understand

On the tool, summarize the main idea of the comic and provide two pieces of evidence that helped you understand the creator’s main idea. You can do this only in writing or you can get creative with some art. Some of the evidence you find may come in the form of text (words). But other evidence will come in the form of art (images). You should read the text looking for unfamiliar vocabulary words, the main idea, and key supporting details. You should also spend some time looking at the images and the way in which the page is designed. By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

1. Where did Rumi live as a young man, and what was his home city like?
2. How did meeting Shams Al-Dīn transform Rumi?
3. What did Rumi teach and write about?
4. What is the meaning of Rumi’s poem about a reed, shown around his body in the biography?
5. How does the artist’s design reflect the theme of crossing or transcending borders?

Read 3: Connect

In this read, you should use the graphic biography as evidence to support, extend, or challenge claims made in this unit of the course. On the bottom of the tool, record what you learned about this person’s life and how it relates to what you’re learning.

1. How does this biography of Rumi support, extend, or challenge what you have learned about this period in world history?
2. What did you find surprising or significant about Rumi’s life and biography?

To Be Continued…

On the second page of the tool, your teacher might ask you to extend the graphic biography to a second page. This is where you can draw and write what you think might come next. Here, you can become a co-creator of this graphic biography!