Elena Riecke, a senior at Columbia High School, already knows how it feels to be a published author. Her junior research paper has been accepted by The Concord Review for publication in its Winter 2011 edition.

The Concord Review is a quarterly journal that has been publishing outstanding historical essays from high school students (in English) from around the globe since 1987. As the website states, "We believe that the pursuit of academic excellence in secondary schools should be given the same attention as the pursuit of excellence in sports and other extracurricular activities, and we have found that many students do exemplary work in history."

According to The Concord Review website, "Many of our authors have sent reprints of their papers with their college application materials, and they have gone on to Brown (25), Chicago (13), Columbia (18), Cornell (15), Dartmouth (18), Harvard (107), Oxford (12), Pennsylvania (23), Princeton (57), Stanford (30), Yale (94), and a number of other fine institutions, including Amherst, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, Caltech, Cambridge, Chicago, McGill, Middlebury, MIT, Reed, Smith, Trinity, Tufts, Virginia, Wellesley, Wesleyan, and Williams."

For more information about the publication, visit tcr.org.

Riecke wrote about the Fred Harvey Company and the "Harvey Girls." Fred Harvey created a series of restaurants along the Santa Fe train lines in the 19th century to provide good, affordable, clean food choices for travelers for the first time. He recruited "Harvey Girls" through newspaper ads, insisting on women with an 8th grade education and "good moral values." You can find out more when Elena's paper is published in The Concord Review (it will be available online later this month).

In a letter accepting her paper, TCR Founder Will Fitzhugh wrote, "Your account of Fred Harvey's wonderful efforts in the American West will be of interest to our readers, and I am glad to have been able to distribute the work of our authors in years past to subscribers in 42 states in the U.S. and in 35 other countries."

Fitzhugh wrote that Riecke's paper would be used by history teachers in other schools around the world as an example of good historical writing.