The Concord Review, founded in 1987, is the only journal in the world devoted exclusively to publishing the academic history papers of secondary school students. It accepts submissions from across the English-speaking world and beyond, and its standards are those of serious historical scholarship: primary sources, original argument, proper citation, and the kind of sustained, disciplined prose that the best university history departments would recognize as the real thing. Over a thousand papers have been published since its founding, drawn from authors in more than forty countries. The journal's alumni have gone on to the most selective universities in the world, not because the Concord Review is a credential but because the kind of student who can write for it is the kind of student those universities want.
Hyuksun Kwon’s paper, “Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism, and Nazi Racial Theory,” was accepted for publication. It is fifty pages of argument, grounded in both primary texts and scholarly secondary literature, tracing the gap between what Nietzsche actually wrote and what the Nazi ideologists — Rosenberg, Bäumler, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche — made of him. The argument is not simple. It requires holding Nietzsche’s middle and mature periods in careful distinction, attending to his Lamarckian concept of race as against the biological determinism of Gobineau and Günther, and accounting for the motives and methods of those who systematically falsified his texts. Hyuksun does all of this, with footnotes.
The subject is not incidental to the classical tradition. Nietzsche’s intellectual formation was that of a classical philologist; he held the chair of classical philology at Basel at twenty-four, younger than any scholar before him. His first book was a reading of Greek tragedy. His quarrel with Wagner was inseparable from his quarrel with the Romantics’ use of antiquity. To understand what the Nazis did with Nietzsche, one must first understand what Nietzsche did with the Greeks — and to understand that, one must be at home in the ancient world in a way that goes beyond the textbook. Hyuksun is. The Concord Review evidently agreed.
Fifty pages of rigorous historical argument, sourced across primary texts and scholarly literature in a field crowded with competing interpretations, is not a common achievement at any age. To produce it as a secondary school student — and to produce it at the level required for publication in a journal that has been setting this standard for nearly four decades — is the measure of a mind already doing the work of a serious scholar. We are proud of Hyuksun, and we are glad to see the formation show.