Writing Assignment Description

Eric Keen, while an 11th grade home-schooled student from Bethesda, Maryland, wrote this research paper on the history of unsuccessful invasions of Afghanistan, using the case study of the first British invasion of the country in 1838. The report is a vivid and well-documented account of the invasion, and also touches on multiple invasions of Afghanistan. It clearly and methodically illustrates the follies of past invasions. Implicit in this report are ramifications for any current and future actions. The reader is left with the tools to draw a logical conclusion of his/her own, without the necessity of the author needing to say much more.

The author was the recipient of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from The Concord Review in 2012.

Since 1987, The Concord Review, a unique quarterly academic journal at the secondary level, has published over 100 issues with over 1,000 exemplary high school history research papers by students from 44 states and 40 other countries. The Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes have been awarded to over one hundred students who have shown outstanding academic promise in history at the high school level since 1995. The website of The Concord Review can be seen here.

According to The Concord Review, the author of this paper is a member of the 2016 class of the University of Miami.