History and Culture, Language and Literature (Selected Essays of Teodoro A. Agoncillo)

If there is one thing that Agoncillo was passionate about, it is the writing of Philippine history from the "Filipino point-of-view". As early as the 1940's, he had lectured on the necessity of re-writing our history in such a way as to view it from the Filipino standpoint. He felt that the facts of our history must be re-evaluated in order to purge our textbooks of the misconceptions and misrepresentations that have corrupted them for generations. He said that in "reading the books and accounts of the history of the Philippines...by the Spanish missionaries and government officials, one finds the Filipinos submerged in the history of Spain in the Philippines. The Filipino... then was written about but he did not write about himself, until the last two decades of the 19th century when some Filipinos of high education -- the illustrados-- took courage to write about the Filipinos. One can see this viewpoint in the textbook, History of the Filipino people (published in 1960), and now in its revised 8th edition, published in 1990, still in use in many colleges and universities throughout the archipelago.