William McNeill, for example, a historian who began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1947, argued that the construction of a unified canon of texts and narratives, if not mythologies, gave students “a sense of common citizenship and participation in a community of reason, a belief in careers open to talent, and a faith in a truth susceptible to enlargement and improvement generation after generation.” The virtue of a core curriculum situated around the Western tradition was that it facilitated and indeed made possible the construction of a national identity in the United States from a
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