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First off I don’t know if I made myself clear but I meant to refer to recent graduates of the university here where I live. If you are much more than thirty years old you wouldn’t be in that group and I have no idea of your age or where you went to school so I will give you a sample of questions that I have asked of recent history majors here.

1. Who was the president of the Confederacy?
2. What year did the American civil war start?
3. Who was president of the USA when the civil war started?
4. What political party did Abraham Lincoln belong to?
5. What nation did the original colonies revolt and go to war against to gain independence and form the USA?
6. What was the battle of Hastings?
7. What was the Magna Charta? (Charta is the spelling used when I was in school, not Carta)
8. Who was president of the USA when we entered WWII?
9. Who was the American president who ordered the bombing of Japan with nuclear weapons?
10.What countries formed the “Axis powers” of WWII?

Those are some of the easier questions I was expected to answer by seventh grade. When I asked these and got only one or two correct answers I didn’t bother to go on to such things as who were the Saxons, who were the Angles, who were the Franks, what was the Feudal system and much much more that I studied before my thirteenth birthday. We were expected to be able to write an explanation of what happened at the Battle of Hastings and how power shifted and changed the world and the same for a lot of other battles and wars. We could write a decent history of the American colonies including a description of trade with other countries and give an account of the entire American Revolution which I doubt could be matched by any young history major I have met recently, I could go on but I don’t want to spend the next hour at this keyboard. I hope that you are not like our local history majors.