Many years ago, in an insane moment, I asked F. Sionil Jose and his wife Tessie if they would consider selling Solidaridad bookstore to me when they retired or grew tired of it. Years of browsing in small used bookstores abroad must have given me romantic views of a...

Deirdre de la Cruz of the University of Michigan and I share a common interest in Guillermo E. Tolentino. As National Artist for Sculpture, everyone recognizes his iconic works like the University of the Philippines’ “Oblation” and the Bonifacio monument in Caloocan,...

Growing up, Nov. 1 always started off with a morning visit to the maternal grandmother I never knew. She was buried on the side of Taguig church, dedicated to Santa Ana, which was built in the 19th century, over the site of others dating way back to the 16th century....

It took Sen. Pia Cayetano, on an official visit to the Palacio del Senado in Madrid, Spain, to bring public attention to “The Battle of Lepanto,” one of Juan Luna’s major but inaccessible paintings. In a recent Instagram post, she posed in front of Luna’s masterpiece...

Trinitrotoluene is the active ingredient of explosives once known as “TNT.” Over the years, the same letters have come to mean different things to different people. TNT for people who send packages means “track and trace.” For Philippine mobile phone users, it means...

Until another contender turns up, Binondo holds the title as the “oldest Chinatown in the world.” It could also be the “oldest Chinatown in America” if we reckon from the period when the Philippines was ruled not from Spain, but indirectly from the Viceroyalty of New...

History Channel on cable TV today is a pale shadow of its original self. In the early days of cable: History, Discovery, and National Geographic channels were a sensible alternative to the inane “entertainment” fed us by local networks. Ging Reyes of ABS-CBN News...

National Teacher’s Day would’ve slipped by me yesterday, if not for a handful of thoughtful greetings received and some pages on my feed that alerted me to it. For many years, on or around National Teacher’s Month, I would dedicate a column or two to those who shaped...

There used to be a group of statues near the old San Ignacio Church grounds in Intramuros that depicted missionaries in their distinctive religious habits. It is unfortunate that being made of resin, these could not withstand the elements, more so the vandals that cut...

Early in my career, I built a reputation as an iconoclast. Revisiting the past and debunking what people previously believed to be true was a joy, until 2002. With the stroke of a president’s pen, I was appointed chair of the National Historical Institute (NHI), and...