Competing with the Independence Day coverage the other day was the news on the repatriation of a long-lost work by Juan Luna — “Hymen, O Hyménée” — painted during his honeymoon in Italy and later exhibited in the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, where it was...

Maria Karina A. Bolasco had been blessed with a job she actually enjoys doing—publishing books. From National Bookstore to Anvil Publishing, and lately the Ateneo de Manila University Press, she was, for over four decades, a disruptor who opened windows in an...

Walking around the Philippine Book Festival this weekend made me reflect on the books that shaped me and my time. I looked back on all the books I have published since 1986 and revisited my now-shattered dream of running a bookstore. Many years ago, I offered to buy...

It is ironic that C.M. Recto Avenue in downtown Manila has gained notoriety for made-to-order fake documents. After all, Claro (clear) Recto (straight) was a Filipino senator who left us with a legacy of integrity and staunch nationalism. In his youth, Recto published...

Why is it that when we talk of Manila as an important, cosmopolitan, capital city, we do so in the past tense? Is it because Manila is lost in the group of cities that now form the National Capital Region? Spanish Manila was contained within (Intra) the walls (Muros),...

To my knowledge, no library in the Philippines or abroad has a complete set of newspapers that were published between the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution in 1896 and the Philippine-American War in 1899. If we had all these primary source materials available in...

Apolinario Mabini died in his brother’s home in Nagtahan in 1903. The wooden house with a nipa roof, now a national shrine, has been moved a number of times. First, from one bank of the Pasig to the other to give way to the expansion of Nagtahan bridge; second, from...

I have always wondered why there is no major war museum in Manila, no peace museum in a city that has often been described as the second most devastated city of World War II after Warsaw. The Warsaw quote is an often repeated claim that has to be fact-checked. Aside...

Some visitors to the main hall of the National Museum of Fine Arts are surprised to find an impressive monument of marble and bronze standing between Juan Luna’s “Spoliarium” and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo’s “Assassination of Governor Bustamante.” If they do not care...

Reading history is an experience in armchair time travel. Going back to a distant past through texts, images, and artifacts is recommended because unlike time travel in sci-fi films, we need not be trapped in there. If at all, history can educate and entertain...