David McCullough wrote: “I very much like and support what you’re doing with The Concord Review. It’s original, important, and greatly needed, now more than ever, with the problem of historic illiteracy growing steadily worse among the high school generation nearly everywhere in the country.”

    The late Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Historian, said: “The Concord Review offers young people a unique incentive to think and write carefully and well…The Concord Review inspires and honors historical literacy. It should be in every high school in the land.”

John Silber, President Emeritus and University Professor, Boston University, said: “I believe The Concord Review is one of the most imaginative, creative, and supportive initiatives in public education. It is a wonderful incentive to high school students to take scholarship and writing seriously.”

The Concord Review

Since 1987, The Concord Review, a unique quarterly academic journal, has published 77 issues with 846 high school history research papers by students from 44 states and 35 other countries. Essays of around 5,500 words, with (Turabian) endnotes and bibliography, on any historical topic (ancient or modern, domestic or foreign), may be submitted, with a completed copy of the Form to Accompany Essays, and a check for $40 made out to The Concord Review, to: The Concord Review, 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776. The author receives the next four issues of the journal. We publish about 7% of the essays we receive. 

William R. Fitzsimmons, Dean of Admissions at Harvard College, has said: “We have been very happy to have reprints of essays published in The Concord Review, submitted by a number of our applicants over the years, to add to the information we consider in making admission decisions [89 of our authors have gone to Harvard]…All of us here in the Admissions Office are big fans of The Concord Review.”

Many of our authors have sent reprints of their papers with their college application materials, and they have gone on to Berkeley(6), Brown(22), Columbia(16), Cornell(14), Dartmouth(13), Harvard(89), Oxford(11), Pennsylvania(17), Princeton(46), Stanford(26), Yale(72), and a number of other fine institutions, including Amherst, Bowdoin, Bryn Mawr, Caltech, Cambridge, Chicago, McGill, MIT, Reed, Smith, Trinity, Wellesley, and Williams.

National Writing Board

The National Writing Board, founded in 1998, has now given an independent, unbiased assessment of high school history research papers from 31 states and two Canadian provinces, and sent each author a three-page report, with scores and comments from two Readers, which she/he has asked us to send to college admissions officers (at 79 colleges so far), or simply could use as feedback on one of her/his best history research papers. Papers of two lengths—around 2,000 words, or around 5,000 words—with (Chicago-style) endnotes and bibliography, may be submitted, with a notarized Submission Form and a check for $200, made out to the National Writing Board, to: the National Writing Board, 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776. [We spend more than three hours on each paper.] We have a fee waiver for those granted a fee waiver by the College Board. The following (39) colleges and universities now endorse this independent assessment service for academic writing: Amherst, Boston University, Bowdoin, Carnegie Mellon, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, Connecticut College, Cooper Union, Dartmouth, Duke, Eckerd, Emory, George Mason, Georgetown, Hamilton, Harvard, Haverford, Illinois Wesleyan, Lafayette, Lehigh, Michigan, Middlebury, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Pitzer, Princeton, Reed, Richmond, Sarah Lawrence, Shimer, Smith, Spelman, Stanford, Trinity (CT), Tufts, the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, Williams, and Yale.

The Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes

    The Emerson Prizes have been awarded to 67 students published in The Concord Review who have shown outstanding academic promise in history at the high school level since 1995. The laureates this 14th year [2008] were from California, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, Toronto, and Washington DC. Past laureates have come from Alabama, Australia,  California, Colorado, Connecticut, Czechoslovakia, Florida, Hong Kong, Illinois, Japan, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, New Zealand, Ontario, Russia, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington DC, and Washington State.

TCR Institute

The TCR Institute, since 2002 the only U.S. think tank focused on student academic work at the high school level, has published a study of the state of the history research paper in U.S. public high schools. The study found that the majority of teachers say they don’t have the time to assign and grade such papers, so 81% never assign a 5,000-word research paper and 62% never assign even a 3,000-word term paper. We plan a study of the assignment of complete nonfiction books in U.S. public high schools, and we have had a number of articles published, in Education Week, the New Mexico Journal of Reading, Knowledge Quest, the New York Sun, School Reform News, EducationNews.org, History Matters!, Edspresso, Gifted Education International (UK), Pope Center’s Clarion Call, Historically Speaking, Education Matters, New Media Journal, History News Network, School Information System, Teachers College Record, and Educational Leadership.

http://www.tcr.org

For a subscription, send a check for $40 for The Concord Review, to: TCR Subscriptions, P.O. Box 476, Canton, MA 02021. Class sets of 26 copies or more receive a 40% discount. Schools in California, New York, Singapore, and Thailand now have class sets. The two different submission forms for The Concord Review and the National Writing Board may each be found on our website, which has had more than 410,000 visitors, and since 1997 has been mirrored on a server in Singapore for the use of history teachers in Asia. This site also has 60 sample essays, including all of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize winners from the last thirteen years. If you have questions, log on and leave an email for Will Fitzhugh at fitzhugh@tcr.org, or call (800) 331-5007.

[Varsity Academics® is a registered trademark of The Concord Review, Inc.]

“Teach by Example” Will Fitzhugh [founder] The Concord Review Consortium for Varsity Academics® Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes National Writing Board TCR Institute 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24 Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA 978-443-0022; 800-331-5007 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org Varsity Academics®