The Department of History congratulates Andrew Ballam for being awarded the David and Ethel Evans Scholarship in History.  This award recognizes each year the outstanding work of a student enrolled in the History Honours program.

Andrew Ballam describes his honours project in this way:

"My Honours research project explores the case of the twenty-two soldiers in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment who were declared killed or missing-in-action following the Battle of Cambrai and who were said to have been buried in the small French village of Séranvillers at a gravesite that the local villagers claimed did not exist.  Although the Red Cross at Germany issued a casualty list stating that these soldiers had died in battle and were buried at Séranvillers, the Dominion of Newfoundland's efforts to exhume and repatriate these bodies after the war were halted once they were told that no burial had occured.  Through the use of the soldier files provided online by The Rooms Provincial Archives, which include the letters sent from concerned family members to the British War Office, this Honours essay hopes to illustrate how rumours proliferate and provide hope for those distressed at the home front during times of war.  It will also explore how wartime rumours afforded agency to those who spread them in supplanting or even contradicting official narratives, how cases of missing soldiers were integrated into Newfoundland's cultural memory of the Great War, and how the idea of the 'noble sacrifice' attempted to address the grief faced by the families of those who could not be repatriated."
-Andrew Ballam, History Honours student