READINGS IN

PHILIPPINE HISTORY
 Table of Contents
Lesson 1: Introduction to History: Definition, Issues,
Sources, and Methodology
Lesson 2: Content and Contextual Analysis of Selected
Primary Sources in Philippine History
Lesson 3: Philippine History: Spaces for Conflict and
Controversies
Lesson 4: Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural
Issues in Philippine History
Lesson 5: Doing History
 Lesson 1:
Introduction to History:
Definition, Issues, Sources,
and Methodology
LESSON OUTCOME
Evaluate primary sources for their
credibility, authenticity, and
provenance
LESSON PROPER
• What Is History?
- Definition and subject matter
• Issues in History
- Objectivity and bias in the study of history
- Historiography
• History and the Historian
- Role of the historian
• Historical Sources
- Primary, secondary, tertiary sources
LESSON PROPER
• What Is History?
- has always been known as the study of the past. While it is
not wrong, it does not give justice to the complexity of the
subject and its importance to human civilization.
- was derived from the Greek word historia which means
"knowledge acquired through inquiry or investigation."
- as discipline existed for around 2,400 years and is as old as
mathematics and philosophy.
- Historia became known as the account of the past of a
person or of a group of people through written documents
and historical evidences. That meaning stuck until the early
parts of the twentieth century.
LESSON PROPER
• What Is History?
- History became an important academic discipline. It
became the historian's duty to write about the lives of
important individuals like monarchs, heroes, saints, and
nobilities. History was also focused on writing about
wars, revolutions, and other important breakthroughs.
- It is thus important to ask: What counts as history?
Traditional historians lived with the mantra of "no
document, no history." It means that unless a written
document can prove a certain historical event, then it
cannot be considered as a historical fact.
LESSON PROPER
• What Is History?
- Giving premium to written documents essentially
invalidates the history of other civilizations that do not
keep written records. Some were keener on passing
their history by word of mouth.
- Others got their historical documents burned or
destroyed in the events of war or colonization.
Restricting historical evidence as exclusively written is
also discrimination against other social classes who
were not recorded in paper.
LESSON PROPER
Issues in History
Indeed, history as a discipline has already turned
into a complex and dynamic inquiry. This
dynamism inevitably produced various
perspectives on the discipline regarding different
questions like: What is history? Why study
history? And history for whom? These questions
can be answered by historiography.
LESSON PROPER
Issues in History
- Historiography is the history of history.
- History and historiography should not be confused with
each other. The former's object of study is the past, the
events that happened in the past, and the causes of such
events. The latter's object of study, on the other hand, is
history itself (i.e., How was a certain historical text written?
Who wrote it? What was the context of its publication?
What particular historical method was employed? What
were the sources used?). Thus, historiography lets the
students have a better understanding of history.
LESSON PROPER
Issues in History
- Positivism is the school of thought that emerged
between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This
thought requires empirical and observable evidence
before one can claim that a particular knowledge is true.
- Positivism also entails an objective means of arriving at
a conclusion. In the discipline of history, the mantra "no
document, no history" stems from this very same truth,
where historians were required to show written primary
documents in order to write a particular historical
narrative.
- Positivist historians are also expected to be objective
and impartial not just in their arguments but also on their
conduct of historical research.
 LESSON PROPER
Issues in History
- As a narrative, any history that has been taught and written
is always intended for a certain group of audience. When the
ilustrados, like Jose Rizal, Isabelo de los Reyes, and Pedro
Paterno wrote history, they intended it for the Spaniards so
that they would realize that Filipinos are people of their own
intellect and culture. When American historians depicted the
Filipino people as uncivilized in their publications, they
intended that narrative for their fellow Americans to justify
their colonization of the islands. They wanted the
colonization to appear not as a means of undermining the
Philippines' sovereignty, but as a civilizing mission to fulfill
what they called as the "white man's burden." The same is
true for nations which prescribe official versions of their
history like North Korea, the Nazi Germany during the war
period, and Thailand. The same was attempted by Marcos in
the Philippines during the 1970s.
 LESSON PROPER
Issues in History
- Postcolonialism is a school of thought that emerged
in the early twentieth century when formerly colonized
nations grappled with the idea of creating their
identities and understanding their societies against the
shadows of their colonial past. Postcolonial history
looks at two things in writing history: first is to tell the
history of their nation that will highlight their identity
free from that of colonial discourse and knowledge,
and second is to criticize the methods, effects, and idea
of colonialism. Postcolonial history is therefore a
reaction and an alternative to the colonial history that
colonial powers created and taught to their subjects.
 LESSON PROPER
Issues in History
- One of the problems confronted by
history is the accusation that the history
is always written by victors. This
connotes that the narrative of the past
is always written from the bias of the
powerful and the more dominant
player.
LESSON PROPER
History and the Historian
- it is the historian's job not just to seek
historical evidences and facts but also to
interpret these facts. "Facts cannot speak for
themselves." It is the job of the historian to give
meaning to these facts and organize them into
a timeline, establish causes, and write history.
Meanwhile, the historian is not a blank paper
who mechanically interprets and analyzes
present historical fact.
LESSON PROPER
History and the Historian
- He is a person of his own who is influenced by his own
context, environment, ideology, education, and influences,
among others. In that sense, his interpretation of the
historical fact is affected by his context and circumstances.
His subjectivity will inevitably influence the process of his
historical research: the methodology that he will use, the
facts that he shall select and deem relevant, his
interpretation, and even the form of his writings. Thus, in
one way or another, history is always subjective. If that is
so, can history still be considered as an academic and
scientific inquiry? Historical research requires rigor.
LESSON PROPER
History and the Historian
- Despite the fact that historians cannot ascertain absolute
objectivity, the study of history remains scientific because of the
rigor of research and methodology that historians employ.
Historical methodology comprises certain techniques and rules
that historians follow in order to properly utilize sources and
historical evidences in writing history. Certain rules apply in cases
of conflicting accounts in different sources, and on how to
properly treat eyewitness accounts and oral sources as valid
historical evidence. In doing so, historical claims done by
historians and the arguments that they forward in their historical
writings, while may be influenced by the historian's inclinations,
can still be validated by using reliable evidences and employing
correct and meticulous historical methodology.
LESSON PROPER
History and the Historian
- The Annales School of History is a school of history born
in France that challenged the canons of history. This
school of thought did away with the common historical
subjects that were almost always related to the conduct
of states and monarchs. Annales scholars like Lucien
Febvre, Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, and Jacques Le
Goff studied other subjects in a historical manner. They
were concerned with social history and studied longer
historical periods. Annales thinkers married history with
other disciplines like geography, anthropology,
archaeology, and linguistics.
LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- historical sources can be classified between primary and
secondary sources. The classification of sources
between these two categories depends on the historical
subject being studied.
- Primary sources are those sources produced at the same
time as the event, period, or subject being studied.
Archival documents, artifacts, memorabilia, letters,
census, and government records, among others are the
most common examples of primary sources. Eyewitness
accounts of convention delegates and their memoirs can
also be used as primary sources.
LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- secondary sources are those sources, which were produced by an
author who used primary sources to produce the material. In other
words, secondary sources are historical sources, which studied a
certain historical subject.
- For example, on the subject of the Philippine Revolution of 1896,
students can read Teodoro Agoncillo's Revolt of the Masses: The
Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan published originally in 1956.
The Philippine Revolution happened in the last years of the
nineteenth century while Agoncillo published his work in 1956,
which makes the Revolt of the Masses a secondary source. More
than this, in writing the book, Agoncillo used primary sources with
his research like documents of the Katipunan, interview with the
veterans of the Revolution, and correspondence between and
among Katipuneros.
LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- the classification of sources between primary and
secondary depends not on the period when the source
was produced or the type of the source but on the subject
of the historical research. For example, a textbook is
usually classified as a secondary source, a tertiary source
even. However, this classification is usual but not
automatic. If a historian chooses to write the history of
education in the 1980s, he can utilize textbooks used in
that period as a primary source. If a historian wishes to
study the historiography of the Filipino-American War for
example, he can use works of different authors on the
topic as his primary source as well.
LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- The historian should be able to conduct an external and
internal criticism of the source, especially primary sources
which can age in centuries.
- External criticism is the practice of verifying the
authenticity of evidence by examining its physical
characteristics; consistency with the historical
characteristic of the time when it was produced; and the
materials used for the evidence. Examples of the things
that will be examined when conducting external criticism
of a document include the quality of the paper, the type of
the ink, and the language and words used in the material,
among others.
LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- Internal criticism, on the other hand, is the
examination of the truthfulness of the evidence. It
looks at the content of the source and examines the
circumstance of its production. Internal criticism
looks at the truthfulness and factuality of the
evidence by looking at the author of the source, its
context, the agenda behind its creation, the
knowledge which informed it, and its intended
purpose, among others.
LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- For example, Japanese reports and declarations during
the period of the war should not be taken as a
historical fact hastily. Internal criticism entails that the
historian acknowledge and analyze how such reports
can be manipulated to be used as war propaganda.
Validating historical sources is important because the
use of unverified, falsified, and untruthful historical
sources can lead to equally false conclusions. Without
thorough criticisms of historical evidences, historical
deceptions and lies will be highly probable.
 LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- One of the most scandalous cases of deception in Philippine history is the
hoax Code of Kalantiaw. The code was a set of rules contained in an epic,
Maragtas, which was allegedly written by a certain Datu Kalantiaw. The
document was sold to the National Library and was regarded as an
important pre colonial document until 1968, when American historian
William Henry Scott debunked the authenticity of the code due to
anachronism and lack of evidence to prove that the code existed in the
precolonial Philippine society. Ferdinand Marcos also claimed that he was
a decorated World War II soldier who led a guerilla unit called Ang
Maharlika. This was widely believed by students of history and Marcos
had war medals to show. This claim, however, was disproved when
historians counterchecked Marcos's claims with the war records of the
United States. These cases prove how deceptions can propagate without
rigorous historical research.
 LESSON PROPER
Historical Sources
- The task of the historian is to look at the available historical sources
and select the most relevant and meaningful for history and for the
subject matter that he is studying. History, like other academic
discipline, has come a long way but still has a lot of remaining tasks
to do. It does not claim to render absolute and exact judgment
because as long as questions are continuously asked, and as long as
time unfolds, the study of history can never be complete. The task
of the historian is to organize the past that is being created so that
it can offer lessons for nations, societies, and civilization. It is the
historian's job to seek for the meaning of recovering the past to let
the people see the continuing relevance of provenance, memory,
remembering, and historical understanding for both the present
and the future.
DISCUSSION POINTS
• History is not just the study of the past. It is a way of
relating oneself to the past of the society where he/she
belongs.
• There is no way we can arrive at an absolute historical
truth because we do not have direct access to the past.
• We are presented representations of the past called
historical sources.
• It is the task of the historian to properly handle and study
historical sources to arrive at a fair historical truth.
• There are different classifications of historical sources and
the value of each differs depending on the purpose that it
serves.
PROCESSING QUESTIONS
1. Why is it important to study history?
2. What classifies as a historical source?
3. How can the historian be fair in his/her
research if history is inherently
subjective?
LESSON SUMMARY
• History is not just the study of the past. It is also a way of
studying the causes that led to the emergence of certain
historical events and phenomena.
• Studying history is useful in terms of understanding how
a person is part of the larger past; in terms of creating
collective consciousness and memory; in learning from
the past and not repeating past mistakes.
• Historians are duty-bound to conduct rigorous historical
research by properly using and analyzing historical
sources.
• Sources are classified as primary, secondary, and tertiary.
Each classification is useful in different purposes.