Hackley Junior's Essay Accepted for Publication in 'The Concord Review'
Hackley junior Sam Sanders recently earned the prestigious honor of having his essay on the ancient Greek historian Polybius and how a better understanding of his psychology formed as a detainee can inform his more well-known historiographic methods and political ideas accepted for publication in the summer edition of The Concord Review, a quarterly publication for history papers written by high school students that has a 5% acceptance rate.
Sam spoke with the Communications Office about the subject of his paper and the path to publication.
Q: Tell us about your paper.
Sam: So, I wrote an 8,000-word research paper on this ancient Greek historian called Polybius. I got into him because I knew I wanted to write a research paper, I knew I wanted to do more in history, and I was really into Classics but also government. I was like, “OK, how can these two intersect?” So I did some research on classical influences on the Constitution, and I found this guy—he was a historian but he had a lot of political ideas, as well. So, I just explored him and my first draft was basically all political ideas, but then my second draft I kind of took a different approach. I [thought], “Well, that paper has been written before [about] his political ideas and the importance of them.” But less well explored is his psychology, because he had a very interesting background—he was a Greek but he was detained by Rome … [as] basically a political prisoner, but he wrote these histories that praised Rome tremendously. Why would he do that?
[I thought], there has to be something underneath the surface and how did that influence how he wrote history and the reception of his ideas? So I took a little bit of a different approach on him; … it wasn’t just the standard cut-and-dry history paper. You can’t [always] put together the entire picture, sometimes you have to guess, and this one was really rewarding because it shows me that these types of papers do work and that saying something new and interesting does pay off.
Q: Where did you conduct your research and find your sources?
Sam: A lot of the research was at home just basically reading a source and going through the footnotes. JSTOR, which I got through Hackley, was really helpful—I’ve used that on previous history papers. … We were walking around Princeton University one time … and my dad was like, “Why don’t we just go see what they have on Polybius?” So we went to the library for like two hours, just going through finding Polybius books, and then got home and the eight books we got just had so many things. And then [I looked] through those footnotes and just Googling—it was a lot of organic things. And, obviously, I got pointers from Mr. Sheppard (Classics Department Chair) and the other faculty at Hackley, as well.
Q: What inspired you to submit your paper for publication?
Sam: Well, I had a good friend, Thomas DeGirolami ’22, … who had also submitted for The Concord Review and got published, so I knew that existed and I knew that it could be done. I think that, obviously, this is like the thing that you want to shoot for, so it wasn’t a matter of if I wanted to—I knew I wanted to. It was more a matter of, how can I do it? And I think that my approach helped with that. Also, my Independent Research in History class with Mr. King, the first day, he had a bunch of essays from The Concord Review, and he gave them out to people. At that point, I knew I was going to do it, but it was reaffirmation that yeah, this is right.
Q: How did it feel knowing that you were accepted and published?
Sam: Unreal. [On their website, it says] that you’ll be notified by letter the month before it comes out, so I submitted on Feb. 1 for the summer edition, which is supposed to come out June 1. That means that I could be let known sometime in May—they say a letter [but] I didn’t know if it’s a physical letter or an email, and I didn’t know if it [would be] exactly a month. So I’m going through late April and I’m like, “OK, I’m probably not going to get published. They would have let me know by now.” … Fast forward to May 18, and I got the physical letter in the mail [that I was getting published].
Q: Has it inspired you to write more papers and try to get published again?
Sam: I don’t know if I’ll try again for The Concord Review, just because I feel like it would be a disservice to my paper if I tried to write it again because I feel like I wouldn’t have enough time—it took me eight months to write this and I don’t have that time, frankly. But I do want to submit for a number of other things. There’s this Classics journal, Antigone, which is more literary pieces, where you have something in the ancient world [and you think about] how does that inform us about the modern times? So, maybe that over the summer. In Classics, we just finished putting together our edition of the Concordia, which is a Classics-inspired journal, and that’s going to come out next week. So, I don’t know, maybe something stuck with me. Definitely the world of publications interests me.