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Home > Features > A Forum for Student Historians
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A Forum for Student Historians
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by Will Fitzhugh
Founder, Concord Review
Concord, Massachusetts
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| | An Interview with the Founder of the Concord Review
Will Fitzhugh, a graduate of Harvard College, left management consulting and taught high school for 10 years in Concord, Massachusetts, before founding the Concord Review in 1987. He founded the National Writing Board in 1998 and the National History Club in 2002. Fitzhugh recently spoke with AP Central's Lawrence Charap about the mission of the Review and what it looks for in student essays.
Could you explain the mission and nature of the Concord Review, discuss the essays it publishes, and mention who its typical readers are?
The purposes of the Review are twofold: one is to recognize diligent students of history at the high school level; the other is to distribute their work to other high school students as examples of what they might want to do. We receive a lot of good work from students around the world, and we don't just hold on to what we find -- we bring it to a wider audience. We have an international readership -- we've been an international publication from the very beginning, reaching 34 countries, with student submissions from countries such as Morocco, Singapore, and Finland. The nice thing about that is that it gives American students examples of the work of their peers in other countries. And if anyone in the world wants to look at high school students' historical essays, we will provide them.
How do you think that the Review can best be used in the history classroom?
I think there are two answers to that: first, that the material in the Review covers the same kinds of content teachers are discussing in their classrooms, and second, that it is generally interesting to kids to see what other kids are doing and to read and relate to other students' research. In terms of the content of the papers, there is a great variety of topics in the Review, because we don't tell students what to write about. That might mean that a given issue would be less useful to a teacher who is on, say, the Civil War -- although in the course of a one-year subscription, a teacher is sure to find at least one or two essays that can be easily applied to their class. We are going to be coming out with a CD-ROM with 550 student essays this summer, and we hope that will be much more useful for specific teaching units. In general we hope that students will learn some history and see examples of good academic nonfiction writing at the same time, and that the Review can be used to provide examples of both.
How much context do you think students need to understand the journal's methodology? How easy or difficult do you think it is for students to understand a professional historical journal's methodology?
We don't present it as a professional history journal at the high school level -- just as the Concord Review. The Review doesn't attempt to provide cutting-edge history, but just good term papers. Some historians have told us our essays are as good as those written by their grad students and so forth, but we're not trying to imitate other journals. The best way for students to figure out what we do is to read the articles we publish.
We don't have rules and regulations (though we do use Chicago/Turabian style for references). For examples, we have 55 essays on our Web site at the moment, and they average between 4,000 and 6,000 words. We tell students that the longest we've published is 21,000 words, but we have published pieces that are only 4,000 words long. The only problem with papers that are 4,000 words long is that they are in competition with papers that are 7,000 to 8,000 words long. They should keep that in mind.
Are there particular historical periods or topics that tend to receive the heaviest coverage?
Certainly the U.S., partly because we get most essays from American schools. There's a tendency in high school to take up world and ancient history in the ninth grade, and a lot of students study U.S. history in eleventh grade. And as kids get up in the high school grades, their focus tends to shift to the present. The International Baccalaureate more or less says history begins at 1750, so if you do a history paper, it's going to have a topic after 1750, though of course there's a lot of history before then. We don't get many papers on ancient or medieval history, though we do get some. The bias tends to be toward U.S. and more recent history.
What types of essays do you look for, and how does the selection process work?
We don't have a committee; we have one editor, and he picks the ones that he thinks are the best. The best essays show a lot of reading, and that students have thought about what they've read, and that they've written a serious paper that other people could read. The best way to design a good essay is to read and to read a lot -- as Samuel Johnson said, "A man will turn over half a library to produce one book."
As far as topics, to write an essay on a topic that we've already published is not a drawback. There have been issues that had more than one essay on the same topic. But it's useful to read back issues to get an idea of what other students have done. There's no single set of guidelines that you have to follow to write a successful essay.
Are there any ways in which the journal will be changing in the future?
We will continue to produce four copies a year, 44 essays, in printed form. The CD-ROM will be $100 for 550 essays. There will be some extra work that has to go into preparing material for the CD-ROM. A new CD-ROM will appear the following year, with 594 history research essays.
We have also started the National Writing Board, which provides an independent assessment of student papers. It was founded in 1998 and is endorsed by 25 colleges, including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. We provide two readers who know nothing about the author; they read the paper and write reports, and we put the reports together and send them to deans of admission, at 58 colleges so far. So, you might not get your paper published in the Concord Review, but you will be able to have your paper evaluated by the National Writing Board. There's a lot more information available at our Web site.
I'd like to emphasize that it's very easy to find out more about the Review at the Web site. Our site has had 195,000 visitors, and it has been mirrored on a server in Singapore for the use of teachers in Asia since 1997. We have 55 student essays available online, as well as the contents of back issues, including one from 1995 prepared in cooperation with the College Board. You can e-mail or call with questions or to request a sample copy at fitzhugh@tcr.org or (800) 331-5007.
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