A Conversation with Mairead O'hara

The Persian Chronicles of Chinggis Khan and the Mongols: Chinggis Khan the World Destroyer or Civilization Builder

Mairead is a junior tennis player who is majoring in history. While she may have come to study  American history, she accidentally fell in love with the medieval world. 

This piece came from Dr. White’s junior seminar, coupled with her long-running interest in how historians, much like journalists, shape the stories they tell—especially when they hold influence over massive audiences. She discussed how, because of the vast amount of dominion they had, that large amount of dominion affects so many people’s lives.

She explained, “I wanted to look at historians at the time and how their background and experiences would affect how they viewed Mongol conquest.” Fascinated by chroniclers of the same era offering different takes, Mairead dives into how this affects how we view history and how it is interpreted later. Mairead talked about how having these biases in the chroniclers’ lives can be seen in how different their accounts can be and how the framing of the situations is done in their writing.

When discussing the piece and what her favorite part of her writing was, she said that her favorite part was, “Nonetheless, comparisons of their works offer valuable insight into the influences of personal experience, political allegiances, and cultural contexts on historical narratives of the Mongol period.”