WASHINGTON – The ferocity of the debate in recent weeks over what makes an American – the heated immigration argument in the Congress, the large-scale protests on city streets – may have shocked some citizens, but it’s an issue the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bruce Cole, addresses every day.

“We have waves of people coming into our country, seeking the blessings of our liberties,” some of whom arrive without clear ideas of what unites them to America or what binds Americans to each other, Mr. Cole said last week. “We’re not united by blood or land,” the historian said. “We’re united by ideals.”

Defining and defending those American ideals has become the purview of the NEH since Mr. Cole acceded to his current post in December 2001. Since then, the endowment has seen its annual budget grow to almost $141 million in its request for fiscal year 2007, from $120 million.

This year, about $15 million will go to the NEH’s “We the People” American history program, which Mr. Cole described as the centerpiece of the endowment’s work under the Bush administration.

The initiative, announced by the president in 2002, seeks to remedy Mr. Cole’s observation that Americans “don’t know anything about U.S. history.” According to a 2002 Columbia Law School study, 69% of Americans of voting age thought the infamous doctrine of Karl Marx, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” “is” or “might be” enshrined in the American Constitution.

“Empty heads get filled with empty ideas,” Mr. Cole said during an interview last week at the NEH’s headquarters in Washington’s Old Post Office Pavilion, itself a piece of American history. “They believe conspiracy theories – they believe things like Oliver Stone.”

The “We the People” project, Mr. Cole said, works to replace the emptiness with the compelling narrative of America’s history and “well-grounded patriotism.” In promoting traditional instruction of American history, Mr. Cole said, “We want to tell the whole story,” acknowledging, “yes, there are valleys – but there are many, many more peaks.”

The project is particularly urgent, the chairman said, in a time of war, when America’s enemies are inspired in their killing of our civilians and soldiers by their hatred of American freedoms.

“How can we defend our liberties if we can’t define them?” Mr. Cole said.

To that end, the NEH is working simultaneously to preserve the evidence of America’s history, to revive interest in it, and to improve the teaching of it.

The instruction, Mr. Cole said, is particularly important because overwhelming numbers of American schoolteachers lack basic knowledge of the American history they are tasked with imparting to their pupils. As part of “We the People,” the NEH – principally a grant-making institution – is financing seminars, classes, and workshops for teachers to obtain such understanding from specialists and scholars in their areas of instruction.

Last year, the endowment sponsored two one-week workshops for 100 teachers on “James Madison and Constitutional Citizenship” at the fourth president’s lifelong home, Montpelier. The program continues this year as one of 19 NEH-funded workshops on American history and literature available to 1,935 school teachers and 350 community college instructors that will take place this summer at historical American landmarks. The available workshops include “Ellis Island, Public Health, and Immigration, 1900-1924,” to be held at Ellis Island and in New York City.

The endowment also is trying to inform American history teachers online and in their own schools. On the NEH’s Web site, more than 200 lesson plans in American history and literature, developed for the endowment, are available to teachers of art, literature, foreign language, and American and world history. A lesson plan on Anne Frank, for example, incorporates the resources of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The NEH has devised an annual “We the People” bookshelf, compiling American literary classics built around a theme related to America’s history and founding principles. About 2,000 schools and libraries receive the “shelf” – hardcover copies of the books – on a competitive basis. Past themes have included “Freedom,” with works by George Orwell and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and “Courage,” with writings by pioneer chronicler Laura Ingalls Wilder and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. This year’s theme is “Becoming an American,” with selections on the immigrant experience.

The idea behind providing such resources, Mr. Cole said, is to inspire America’s teachers with a love of history and to help them spark interest in their students. While many American schoolchildren appear bereft of familiarity with their country’s history, Mr. Cole noted, recent works about the American founding have become best sellers, suggesting a widespread hunger for well-told accounts of the country’s past.

Mr. Cole stressed the importance of an early affection for history in his own career, which began with his exposure to Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society as a young man. Mr. Cole, an Ohio native, became an art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance art, and has written 14 books. An NEH grantee, Mr. Cole was a professor of art history and comparative literature at Indiana University in Bloomington before he was tapped to serve as the NEH’s chairman.

During his tenure, Mr. Cole said he has been especially proud of the National Digital Newspaper Program, a “We the People” project to digitize 30 million pages from 200,000 historic American newspapers published between 1830 and 1923. The first 250,000 full images of the news pages will be start becoming available for free on the Library of Congress’s Web site this fall.

“This is a great first draft of our history,” Mr. Cole said.

Among other noteworthy undertakings is the awarding of more than $1 million worth of $30,000 grants to the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, to help recover and preserve treasures of American history that withstood the erosion of centuries only to be swept away by roaring winds and rising floodwaters.

“In many cases, it’s meant the difference between an organization continuing to exist and simply disappearing,” the executive director of the Mississippi Humanities Council, Barbara Carpenter, said of the grant money, which began flowing to the Gulf Coast just weeks after the storms hit.

NEH grants are preserving and documenting artifacts and historic items in Iraq as well, Mr. Cole said. More than $1.4 million has been spent on archiving and cataloging projects, including a $100,000 grant to educate and train 25 Iraqi librarians and archivists to preserve Iraq’s treasures amid war.

“Contrary to stereotypes, this administration has been very interested in culture and the arts,” Mr. Cole said.

The NEH under the Bush administration has also undergone a marked change from the Clinton administration, according to Roger Kimball, the co-editor and publisher of a monthly magazine of culture, the New Criterion.

“I think that basically in the Clinton years, you had kind of an oscillation between kind of a sclerotic populism on the one hand and a senile effort to be transgressive and avant-garde on the other,” Mr. Kimball, who is also the president and publisher of Encounter Books, said. “And this produced a National Endowment for the Humanities which was in every possible way at odds with its mandate, which is to preserve and transmit the cultural heritage of the West generally and the United States in particular.”

Under Mr. Cole’s tenure, Mr. Kimball said, “What you see is a renewed seriousness about the cultural patrimony of our culture, and I think there’s a renewed understanding that in order to go onward as a vigorous citizenry, we need to know where we’ve come from and the kinds of struggles out of which this country was forged.”

That idea of institutional memory, Mr. Cole said, is one of the most important goals of “We the People,” citing the warning given by Benjamin Franklin in 1787.

“A woman went up to Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional Convention and asked him, ‘Well, Doctor, what have we got – a republic or a monarchy?'” Mr. Cole recounted. “And Franklin responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.’

“The point is, ‘If you can keep it,'” he added.