Teodoro Agoncillo's History of the Filipino People: A PDF Guide to the Philippines' Culture and Heritage

he says that biography and history should be linked. the historian should be the same person who will tell the story but we should always keep in mind that this is a story that we are telling to those who are interested in the event. the biography has to be faithful to the facts. the story is an interpretation of the facts by the historian. the biography is more objective, the story is subjective.

philippine history by teodoro agoncillo pdf

as a historian you must know that it is not correct to say that what we write is history, what the people have written is history, and what they wrote are lies. and this is where you have to make the person more human.

if you do not make it more human, then it will be just a story. you cannot use it for your school work or for a thesis. you can make it in a novel and it will be a best seller. but it will not be history. it will be fiction. history is not just what happened. history is the interpretation. history is the story of the event.

his first book was published in 1911 and widely disseminated in the united states and europe. he had met and befriended american historian frederick jackson turner when the latter was a student in madrid. he also wrote several other books that were to influence the course of filipino history. the most famous of these is panunumpa: the origin of the filipinos which was published in new york in 1922. he was the very first historian to write about the filipino nation in a modern context.

agoncillos legacy is full of paradoxes and some challenges. his huge influence in a short time, however, was largely due to his success in using mass communication tools to communicate history to the masses, both filipinos and foreign readers. he had demonstrated that history could be popularized and made interesting and understandable, especially to a younger generation. his key strategy was to present historical moments using modern constructs such as the nation state, nationalism, populism, and nationalism in the third world, and he used these new concepts to explain past events. he succeeded in doing this, and his mass appeal made him a name worth remembering for decades.