One hundred and twenty seven years since the Bonifacio brothers, Andres and Procopio, were executed in the Maragondon range, questions remain. Was the death sentence handed out by the military court fair? Was Aguinaldo responsible? Why did he initially commute the...

Philippine summers are associated with other things aside from heat: mangoes and siniguelas, roadside halo-halo and mais con hielo stands, the rites of Holy Week, the Santacruzan and Flores de Mayo, last but not least, the much-anticipated break between academic...

Saturnina Rizal de Hidalgo was the National Hero’s eldest sister. She was always “[Se]ñora Neneng” to Jose Rizal, addressed in the third person with a deference second only to his mother. I had always known that handwritten letters of Rizal preserved in the Ateneo de...

May Day is Labor Day to many. It is International Workers’ Day. It is “Araw ng Mangagawa,” an annual holiday legislated for the Philippines since 1908. It is also a church feast commemorating St. Joseph the Worker. It also reminds me of the international distress...

I was once asked, informally, to comment on a long table of Philippine hardwood that the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas wants to believe was used at the inauguration of the Malolos Congress in September 1898. Save for the provenance provided by the seller, it is...

I often remind my students that there is a lot more to the internet than online shopping, TikTok, reels, and porn. If I had the internet in college, I would have hit the ground running when I started writing on Philippine history for the Daily Express Weekend Magazine...

It is probably a professional bias, but each time I open the Inquirer online, I scroll to the grayscale page that is a reproduction of page one from the past. Yesterday, the front page story of choice from April 18, 1992 was a report on 14 penitents who were crucified...

All the nostalgia over books and reading generated by my last column on books and readership required a second column. Over the years, I have learned that it is not enough to write and publish books. Authors today have to market their books. Gone are the days when...

One of the sources for my opening keynote at the Asian Literacy Conference in Manila next week is the 2023 Readership Survey commissioned by the National Book Development Board (NBDB). At first glance, the figures are very depressing, with readership of nonschool...

My Holy Week penance this year was unusual, partly because I enjoyed it. This consisted of online browsing through various prewar periodicals: El Renacimiento, La Vanguardia, Tribune (published in Manila), as well as provincial ones like Progress and the Visayas...