On December fifth, WA held the WA Journal of History Publication Breakfast. The breakfast celebrated the student authors whose work from last year was selected for this year’s journal.

The WA Journal of History was started last year by history teacher Mr. Gorham, and was funded by the Westford Academy trustees, particularly Herb and Lori Cogliano.

“I started it last year due to a grant that I applied for and received. […] I had wanted it to be a showcase of my best student writers,” said Gorham.

Gorham says that he later decided to broaden it to include the members of his department.

The selection process for the papers involved individual teachers selecting papers written by their students and giving them to Gorham, who along with a colleague, Ms. Winokur, edited the papers for this year’s journal.

Gorham first got the idea from his frustration with the knowledge that he would get these wonderful papers and after he handed them back to the students, that they would just be thrown away or lost in students’ folders.

“That distressed me, I thought ‘there’s got to be a longer life for some of these wonderful pieces of scholarship’,” said Gorham.

The chosen papers are professionally edited, published, and put into a book. Although the students do not get a scholarship specifically for being in the book, the students can use the book for college and future higher education.

One of the students whose work was selected is senior Devon Whitney, who wrote, The Caring and Keeping of Trees: How Environmental Protection Became American Policies, a paper on the environmentalist movement.

“It was really cool to have that extra push of the idea that what I was writing was promising enough for something cool like this,” said Whitney.

Another paper chosen was Senior Emma Hill’s paper on the women’s involvement in the creation of the atomic bomb during the Manhattan project.

“Starting in seventh grade […] I made it a goal of mine, each year to [write research papers] about important women,” said Hill.

Gorham is proud of his student authors.

“Being published at such a young age is certainly a nice thing to have done for them,” Gorham said.