Had Andres Bonifacio died of old age or natural causes on May 10, 1897, the date would not be controversial. However, May 10, 1897, reminds us of the split within the leadership of the Philippine revolution that led to the execution of the Bonifacio brothers: Andres...
The past, I was taught in graduate school, is a foreign country. Things are supposed to be different then, but my recent reading of prewar Filipiniana at the University of Michigan shows that the past is not so foreign, it actually reads a lot like the present....
The phone rang in my uncle’s living room one day, and we heard the househelp answer politely, “Good morning po.” The person on the other end wanted my uncle on the line, “maari po ba makausap si Mr. Ocampo.”Read more:...
On my next trip to Madrid, I will not be in search of Jose Rizal or Juan Luna. I will be following the trail of an 18th-century elephant in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. How could I have missed this bit of scientific Filipiniana all this time? Years of...
Jose Rizal and Josephine Bracken living outside of marriage surely kept the “Maritess” of their time busy and wide awake in the sleepy town of Dapitan, Zamboanga del Norte. After all, Rizal and Josephine were, in the eyes of the pious and judgmental, “living in sin.”...
The Philippines is a young nation with an old history, and it is unfortunate that language separates young Filipinos from 333 years of their past. When the 1987 Constitution named Filipino and English as official languages of the Philippines, Spanish was dropped from...
It is a real pity that most Filipinos only remember the main contenders in a national election. The losers can sometimes be more interesting than the winners. In 1935, the two main contenders were Manuel Luis Quezon vs. Emilio Aguinaldo. Bishop Gregorio Aglipay gets...
The first national elections in the Philippines were held on Sept. 16, 1935. All schoolchildren know that Manuel Luis Quezon was elected president and Sergio Osmeña vice president, but they do not know the details. Emilio Aguinaldo, Gregorio Aglipay, and Pascual...
Gadget Addict is one of my favorite online reality shows, even if it irritates me. Getting violators to hand over their license is harder than pulling teeth. Everyone has an excuse. Motorcycle riders caught wearing slippers or those without crash helmets, driver’s...
Tsundoku” is the Japanese word for stacks of books you bought but have not read. I have a lot of those. I grew up in a house with books because my father was a reader. He had a taste for crime and whodunits, so the lower shelves of our library were filled with Erle...