Ninth Emerson Prizes to be awards in Memphis - Brief Article

Sudbury, Massachusetts--The ninth annual Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes for student work of outstanding academic promise at the secondary level will be awarded this Spring to Rachel Hines of Olney, Maryland (now at the University of Maryland), Jessica Leight of Northampton, Massachusetts (now at Yale), Chrystan Maria Skefos of Memphis, Tennessee (now at Rice), and Robert Patrick Vance, Jr. of New Orleans, Louisiana (now at the University of Pennsylvania) according to Will Fitzhugh, Editor and Publisher of The Concord Review [http://www.tcr.org].

The awards will be hosted by the Cliosophic Society, the National History Club chapter at St. Mary's Episcopal School in Memphis, Tennessee in the evening on Saturday, April 5, 2003. The prize research papers are on the journal's website.

Each Emerson Prize laureate will receive a check for $3,000, and a copy of David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Truman, along with the letter of award. Past Emerson awards have gone to high school students from Czechoslovakia, Colorado, Washington, D.C., Florida, California, Tennessee, Vermont, New Zealand, Utah, Massachusetts, Russia, Washington State, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Illinois, Japan, and New York.

Founded in 1987, The Concord Review, the first and only quarterly journal in the world for the academic work of secondary students, has published 52 issues with 572 essays (average 5,000 words) by students of history in forty-two states and thirty-three other countries. These exemplary essays have been distributed to subscribers throughout the United States and in thirty-two other countries.

Diane Ravitch, Senior Research Scholar at New York University and former Assistant Secretary of Education, has said: "The Concord Review provides a splendid forum for the best student work in history. It deserves the support of everyone in the country who cares about improving the study of history in the schools."