Morning walks in a gated community can be boring once you have passed through all the streets and memorized the street names. To take my mind off the effort it takes to exercise and lose weight, I tune in to my surroundings: looking at the different trees and shrubs...

Although my area of specialization is the late 19th-century Philippines, particularly the heroes who figure in the birth of the nation, I have recently strayed into the 20th century. I have been browsing through old periodicals—newspapers, magazines, journals, even...

College-level Philippine history is now taught using primary sources in a course called “Readings in Philippine History.” Its acronym, “RIPH,” reflects students’ feedback on death by boredom. The problem is not history or course content but a learning gap of seven to...

History is rooted in a story or narrative. It should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should be relevant and more importantly, engaging. When people confess that they don’t like history, I tell them that they had a bad history teacher or textbook. They did not...

Much of what appears in my social media feeds, either for or against the events of Edsa 1986, is drawn from fleeting memories. For my current undergrad students, all these happened in the last century. To them, Edsa 1986 is as distant as the 1896 Philippine...

Looking at photos of Intramuros taken shortly after the 1945 Battle for Manila, it is clear that many structures—or at least the shell or facade—remained. In retrospect, some of these could have been reconstructed to retain what remained of the once “Distinguished and...

Filipinos who have heard of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) or its former iteration as the National Historical Institute, know it as the government agency responsible for Philippine history: its propagation and dissemination in...

While plagiarism is easier to do these days, the internet also makes it easier to detect. All a teacher needs to do is to drop a chunk of a suspect student essay into Google and it will match to the source. Universities subscribe to apps like Turnitin that...

Now that I am older and presumably wiser, I want to revisit places I didn’t think much about when visited in my youth. Offhand, the two nearby places that may have connections to the Philippines are the former Portuguese settlements of Malacca and Macao. First on my...

Although I am one-eighth Chinese and consider myself Tsinoy, we did not celebrate Chinese New Year growing up. Before it was declared a non-working holiday, Chinese New Year was confined to Chinese and Tsinoy communities, but it has caught on in the past two decades...