Unit 1: Roots & Remembrance — The Way of Kings

• Read essays, speeches, and historical accounts alongside The Way of Kings, examining how Dalinar's visions function as primary source evidence and how the Alethi highprince system serves as a case study in civic memory curated to serve power.

• Take a position on a question of civic memory raised by The Way of Kings and write in the mode of public argument, as Dalinar does when he tries to persuade the highprinces to unite.

• Understand how to analyze the relationship between historical narrative and civic argument using The Way of Kings as a central text.

• Explain how Dalinar's recovery of Rosharan history functions as a civic act and how Kaladin's recovery of his own identity constitutes a parallel civic argument about who gets counted as a person in the Alethi system.

• What does Dalinar's struggle with his forgotten past — his memory of the Rift erased by the Nightwatcher — reveal about the relationship between personal and civic accountability?

• How do communities decide which histories to honor and which to forget, and what does the Alethi highprince system reveal about what happens when civic memory is weaponized?

This unit examines how communities construct and maintain shared historical memory through The Way of Kings, the first volume of Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. Dalinar Kholin, Highprince of War, is haunted by visions of ancient Roshar — the age of the Knights Radiant, the Desolations, the Oathpact — and must persuade a fractious assembly of Alethi highprinces that the past is not merely history but urgent instruction. Meanwhile, Kaladin Stormblessed, condemned to Bridge Four and the suicidal work of carrying bridges across the Shattered Plains, discovers that his ability to lead — and to demand accountability from a system designed to kill his crew — is itself a form of civic memory: recovering who he was before the system stripped that from him.