“No one will say that a lively sense of history is one of the intellectual virtues of the American people,” wrote Lionel Trilling in his introduction to 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑝𝑒𝑟 𝑆𝑡𝑢𝑑𝑦, a collection of very high-level essays on Great Books of the Western Tradition.