When Papa was alive, he made every single new faculty member borrow and read this book, perhaps THE definitive Filipino history book as it doesn't "read" like your boring AP/Hekasi school book.
To get an idea of the author's lyrical pen, here are some excerpts from his shorter works.
"History is not objective," wrote the great Teodoro Agoncillo in his essay HISTORY AS HUMANITIES. "In the process of re-creation, the personality of the historian plays an important role. He displays his passion, his prejudices, and emotion — in brief, his humanity... It is this subjectivity that characterizes all great historians, a subjectivity that makes for divergencies in interpretation. It is ignorance of the nature of historical writing that made even learned men in the past say that history is and must remain objective — an impossibility since the historian as man or woman cannot run away from himself/herself."
"If the students today do not have any sympathy for history as a subject it is not because of any defect in the discipline but because of the shortcomings of certain teachers of history...A good teacher of history is not he who can rattle off dates and names like a trained parrot, but he who makes the past come alive in the imagination of the students."
In another essay (LITERATURE AS HISTORY), Agoncillo wrote: "No reader, native or foreign, can enjoy Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo without knowing the circumstances that led the author to conceive them and the reason for their being. The humor, the irony, the piercing satire in their pages would be lost on the reader if he does not understand the historical background of those novels. I once said ... that Rizal’s novels are not, properly speaking, fiction. They are socio-historical novels which give us an intimate glimpse into the condition of Philippine society and the manner and morals of the people ... at a definite point in time. To look upon them as pure fiction is to misread Rizal’s intent and purpose."
No wonder, then, that the great man was not only Chair of the UP History Department, but also head of the National Historical Institute (now known as the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, or the NHCP) until his death in 1985.
The book ends after EDSA 1. So much has happened in the decades since. But we need to look at our past, so we can better understand where we are headed.
(original post here)
No comments:
Post a Comment