King's students selected to take part in World Wars battlefields tour
June 9, 2023
Dr. Graham Broad, Professor of History, and two students, Olivia Holland and Emily Amarelo, have travelled to Europe to be part of the Canadian Battlefields Foundation Battlefield Study Tours.
The Canadian Battlefields Foundation undertakes programs to commemorate and promote public awareness of Canada’s role in the two World Wars and other wars of the 20th century. The Foundation was established in 1992 to educate and actively promote public awareness of Canada’s role in the Second World War. The Battlefield Study Tour program is the Foundation’s bursary program that allows twelve university students from across the country to travel to Europe and explore the battlefields, monuments, and cemeteries of the two World Wars.
Holland and Amarelo applied and were selected to be part of the tour. “Over the past decade, King's students have had a good track record in being selected from a nationwide pool of applicants for the tour,” says Dr. Broad. The students departed on May 26 and will return on June 12.
Dr. Broad will lead a group that includes Holland and Amarelo which will visit the sites of the First World War’s Western Front during the first week of the tour and sites of the Second World War along the Normandy coast during the second week. The tour will visit Ypres, the Somme, Vimy Ridge, Amiens, Dieppe, Caen and Juno Beach.
During the tour, Amarelo will be presenting the biographies of four Canadian nursing sisters who were killed in an air raid in May 1918. She has been working on the presentation with Annalise Bext, a Masters student from the University of Lethbridge. The presentation will provide insight on what nursing looked like in the First World War, the gendered experiences nurses had in having to navigate what it was like to be both an “officer and a lady,” and the memorialization of nurses who died in the First World War.
“I simply cannot recommend Dr. Broad’s World War courses enough,” Amarelo says. In addition to what she learned in the classrooms, Amarelo gained the confidence needed to speak about Canada’s involvement in the World Wars.” In getting such a comprehensive education, “it has empowered and prepared me for this tour,” she adds.
In May 2022, Dr. Broad led a group of students on a tour of European battlefields as part of the experiential learning course, World Wars in History, Memory and Reconciliation. The journey took King’s students to the battlefields and cemeteries of the Somme region in France, eventually landing on the beaches of Normandy.
Holland is very much looking forward to the tour, not only because of the opportunity to visit sites that are important to Canadian history, but to spend two weeks with the other students who have been selected.
She adds that “the biggest thing I am taking with me from King's is the critical thinking skills that are part of every class I've had the privilege to take on campus. This has really prepared me for the conversations we are going to have while we're overseas.”
We wish Dr. Broad and our students the best of luck on the tour!