[homosaur]

As someone who took enough history classes to ALMOST get to major reqs while an undergrad, I agree with you about class difficulty. There was actually very little difference in the difficulty of a 100 and a 400 class. The difference was in depth. Your 100 would be a European History class while your 400 would be about Postwar Germany. I loved history so I was biased toward enjoyment but I can see how those who had little background in history having real difficulty.

There's another side to that--the cool thing about history as a major was that the dept. structure was flatter. It was basically about doing interesting research. You could take 600 level classes with your TAs if you thought you could hang with them in reading. Definitely not the case in the more skill based fields.

Research, of course, is a skill, which is probably what they ought to be teaching more of in 100 level classes. Most kids when they get to college have not been asked to say, write a paper only from primary sources.