"If we are to boast of our best, we must repent of our worst." Thus spoke G. K. Chesterton, who was explaining why the English should own up to what their people had done to the Irish. The same advice could be offered to the American people and particularly their president, who seems to want to apologize about everything except his own peccadilloes. Should America apologize for slavery? Those who balk at the idea usually insist that they were not around at the time and could not possibly have promoted or prevented the institution. But, as Chesterton noted, if we refuse responsibility for history on such grounds we can scarcely take pride in a past that was also not of our own making. As a teacher of American history, I do take pride in the achievements of America and have no trouble identifying with generations of past intellectuals whose class and ethnicity are far remote from my ancestry. But with the joy of pride comes the responsibility of acknowledging the country's shortcomings and human violations. Chesterton called his essay "Paying for Patriotism.".

When considering the new social history that has pervaded the document National Standards for History in the Schools, Chesterton may need to be revised: If we are to boast of our worst, we must trash our best. Thus the Standards spend far more space and time on slavery than on the Constitution, a conservative document whose historical significance would prove far more liberating than the radicalism so dear to historians of the sixties generation. The modern civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and other emancipatory causes would be unthinkable without the Constitution's equal protection of laws and the Court's mandating non-discrimination in hiring, admissions, residential ordinances, contracts, and the like.

"Multiculturalism," writes Nathan Glazer, "is the price America is paying for its inability or unwillingness to incorporate into its society African Americans as it has incorporated so many groups." Unwillingness? As far back as the early sixties, Black Studies Programs were established on numerous campuses in response to demands made by African Americans. And the same rationale Glazer uses now was used thirty-five years ago.

The entry of African Americans, Native Americans, women, and various ethnic minorities into the teaching and writing of American history has been hailed as a victory for multiculturalism and the cult of diversity. Such new subjects are welcomed, but all talk of multiculturalism may be mere verbiage. What has been going on in the academy is not multi-anything but instead a debilitating monoculturalism that results in a specialization and fragmentation in which each department or program does its own thing. And new departments and programs are established along with their perks for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks: that's where the money is.

This problem, scarcely addressed by historians, is even celebrated as a solution in Lawrence Levine's The Opening of the American Mind. Because the campus is now receptive to an increasingly complex and multi-ethnic student population, does it follow that the American mind is more responsive to genuine difference and diversity? It may be the other way around, that we are witnessing the triumph of solipsism, a state where the self desires to experience only itself and remains uninterested in any other academic topic. While multiculturalists sing their own praises for "opening" up to this or that, they do not seem to be troubled by what one scholar has described as the "staggering decline in the teaching of a second language" in the colleges and universities. How can one study other cultures without having at least a preliminary knowledge of their languages? We are told that our new multi-ethnic environment requires us to "stretch the boundaries of our understanding," but the author of such advice appears to accept the narrowing of those boundaries by endorsing a curriculum that represents little more than micro-specialization based more on ethnic identity than intellectual ability. Rather than expanding the horizons of knowledge, multiculturalism lets a hundred fragments bloom, each in its own garden.

The advocates of the new history assume that critics like me wish to return scholarship to the older schools in which the voice of white European males dominated and everyone else remained excluded. On the contrary, I seek to see historiography not go backward but advance forward to the point that it leaves behind the sixties Marxism that has proven to be an albatross to critical thinking. An example of this academic Marxism is the recent Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History? And Other Questions by Harvey J. Kaye, who tells us in the book that he served as an advisor to the Standards project. Ironically, in America it is precisely the ruling classes who support the teaching of history no matter how politically correct and slanted toward the left. The wealthy Bradley Foundation established the National Council for History Education, which in turn endorsed the History Standards. The Ford Foundation has given piles of money for programs in black history and gay and lesbian studies. Power elites support affirmative action, and so it goes.

What is wrong with the new history is not that it is radical but that it is so nauseatingly shallow and sentimental. Get a whiff of the stale odor of one of Kaye's passages:.

The American Revolution and war for indepen-dence; the populism of Jacksonian politics; theCivil War and the ensuing abolition of slavery;the campaigns for women's suffrage and equal-ity; the many generations of farmer and labormovements and Black struggles for survival, free-dom, and justice: the first two hundred years andmore of our history can be read as a narrative ofcontinuous efforts from the bottom up to make realthe aspiration that "We, the People" shall rule.

This "We Shall Overcome!" rhetoric is so far removed from the actual processes of history that Alexander Hamilton would have called it a "lullaby." If blacks, women, farmers, and laborers had to wait to be liberated "from the bottom up," they would still be waiting for history to make is move. Most of the groups specified above were at cross-purposes with such a diversity of aims and clashing interests, so that the rule of one often meant the subordination of the other. "Were the people to posses the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves," observed James Madison, "who could collect the national will and direct the national force?" Hamilton and Madison saw what Karl Marx himself saw but Marxist historians ignore: people move not together in concert but apart from one another in conflict. No wonder the ruling classes have no fear of history when we have such authors writing in the name of poor Marx. Although "We, the People" begins the Preamble of the Constitution, there is no reference to the phrase in the Federalist, whose authors knew a fiction when they saw it and knew there could be no redemption through illustion.