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Well yes and no, picking the 'Junior' list at random, it includes only two works of historiography (Gibbon and Spengler) and lots of original sources. Nothing wrong with Gibbon or Spengler as things to read, though it's a strange choice as literally works of history for a full year. It's even stranger to read the Federalist papers etc. without accompanying it with a single historiographical work. Obviously it's important to read the documents themselves but doing so without attempting or seeing any kind of interpretative framework is meaningless - it would be much more instructive to read a work or two from each of the major historiographical schools of early American history, and realistically I think the course-setters know this, otherwise they would have set primary sources on Rome too, and it's hard to shake the feeling that setting the Federalist papers is a purely aesthetic decision.
In fact just had a look at the Sophmore list and it does set Livy, Tacitus etc. Points for consistency then but this is just silly. The average student would get a thousand times more out of reading Syme or just the Oxford History of the Roman World than any primary sources.
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