Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
455 East 51st Street
New York, NY 10022

Will Fitzhugh
Editor, The Concord Review
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776

24 August 2000


Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

    All hail to The Concord Review—for two reasons in particular.

    First, The Concord Review offers young people a unique incentive to think and write carefully and well. I know how exciting it is when you first see your writings in print. Many years ago, St. Nicholas, a favorite children’s magazine, regularly printed youthful contributions. Among the kids who first saw their words in print in St. Nicholas were Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Eliot Morison, Ring Lardner, Eudora Welty, Henry R. Luce, E.E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Montgomery Clift and many others (including me). The historian Henry Steele Commager even edited a St. Nicholas anthology. In the same way today, The Concord Review, by providing an outlet for youthful talent, recognizes, stimulates and rewards excellence in writing.

    Equally important, The Concord Review specializes in that most central and vital of subjects, history. As I have written elsewhere, history is to the nation as memory is to the individual. Individuals deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been or where they are going; so a nation lacking a sense of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. History, with its eye cast on a longer past and a longer future, is the best preparation for citizenship, and it is the best preparation for making sense out of this dark and stormy world.

    The Concord Review inspires and honors historical literacy. It should be in every high school in the land.

Sincerely,
(signed)
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Historian