Redmond High School students earn top honors in national history essay competition

Two Redmond High School seniors earned the top two honors in the interpretive category of the 2026 David McCullough Essay Prizes, a national competition hosted by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Shaurya Jat captured first place for his essay "Freedom Made Unlivable: Ann Jackson’s Petition and the Legal Performance of Choice in Slaveholding Texas," while Ritika Malpani earned second place for "Beneath the Receipt: Jefferson’s Agrarian Vision and the 1808 Cherokee Annuity." The pair rose to the top of a competitive field that included 765 submissions from 344 schools across 41 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands and 15 countries.

The David McCullough Essay Prizes honor the legacy of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough and are open to high school students attending schools in the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Affiliate School Program, which includes Redmond High School. For the interpretive category, students analyze a primary source from American history contained in the Institute’s collection of more than 87,000 historical documents. Finalists are selected by a panel of Gilder Lehrman master teachers before a jury of historians chooses the winners, with essays evaluated for historical rigor, clarity, use of evidence, empathy, imagination and other criteria.