Winston Churchill had it wrong, says history wunderkind James Fargher ’13. As a young writer, he says, Churchill dismissed late 19th-century British efforts to topple a tribal leader in Sudan’s port of Suakin as a waste of time, not seeing that they “ultimately caused Britain to entrench itself in northeast Africa.” Armed with a Leavell-Oberg Fellowship in History, Fargher combed through Britain’s National Archives last summer to gird his argument for the pivotal effect the British occupation of the Red Sea region had on the Scramble for Africa. His subsequent paper drew immediate praise: the nation’s top undergraduate prize from history honor society Phi Alpha Theta.—Kathryn McMillan ’13