ALDERSGATE COLLEGE READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY

COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND EDUCATION MARY GLENNE G. CAINAR

MODULE 5 DOING HISTORY: A GUIDE FOR STUDENTS

OVERVIEW

It is not enough that we know our history. We must also realize that as agents of social change, we can contribute
to the narrative of the nation by participating in writing about our past and our present. This chapter focuses on applying the
skills we have learned in the previous chapters in writing history. Special attention will be given to doing online research,
library/archival research, biographies/life history, and local/oral history. An additional discussion on interacting with history
through historical shrines and museums will also help us in appreciating the story of the past as it comes to life through our
own experiences in visiting and interacting with these learning spaces.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

At the end of this module, the student should be able to

1. To manifest interest in local history and cultural heritage.
2. To apply historiographical methods in writing the history of one’s locality or country.
3. To incorporate technology in the discipline of history.
4. To appreciate the value of doing history to the present day.

LEARNING FOCUS

LESSON 1
DOING HISTORICAL RESEARCH ONLINE

Let us start with the first tool that any student nowadays would use to do research—the Internet. It has increasingly
become the primary means by which anyone would find any information that they need.
With a single click, students are able to access tons and tons of available information. So much information, in fact,
that it would be easy to get lost in all the data available.

CYBERSPACE
 It is a great resource for research if you know how to use it properly.
 Remember that just because information is available does not mean you should just get it and use it right away—
appropriating something, such as an idea, as yours is considered plagiarism, which is one of the worst crimes in the
academe.
 Treat anything you find online as a source and use the same historical methods you have learned to analyze the
data you get online.

A simple skill that will get you far in doing historical research online is knowing where to look and how to look.

SEARCH ENGINE WEBSITES

 Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com)
 Google (www.google.com)

SEARCH STRING
 It is a combination of words that you use to come up with relevant results arid lead you to what you are looking for.
 The more refined your search string is, the more definite and refined the results will be.
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ALDERSGATE COLLEGE READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY
COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND EDUCATION MARY GLENNE G. CAINAR

GOOGLE
 also provides its own customized platform for scholarly research, called Google Scholar (www.scholar.google.com).
 You may use it to find electronic journal articles, materials from institutional repositories, and book chapters from
many different sources.

GOOGLE BOOKS
 (www.books.google.com)
 It also provides sources for scanned books, where you may be able to read some chapters for free.
 This could be useful if you want to know if a certain book would be useful to your research before going to a
physical library to loan the book or photocopy pages of it.

WIKIPEDIA
 It is the biggest open source encyclopedia in the whole of cyberspace.
 In 2017, it has 40 million articles in 293 languages.
 Being an open source encyclopedia, anyone could contribute or edit articles in the site, which makes some of the
information in the site unreliable.
 Nonetheless, Wikipedia provides a, useful launch pad to sources that you may use for research.
 When you read from Wikipedia, look at the linked citations in the articles, which could lead you to a source you may
use for your own research.

PROJECT GUTENBERG
 (www.gutenberg. org)
 It is the oldest digital library in the world, founded in 1971. It has more than 50,000 items in its collection, which
include many works concerning the Philippines, such as the Doctrina Cristiana (the first published book in the
Philippines), the published travelogues of foreigners who visited the Philippines such as Jagor, de Comyn, Virchow,
Foreman, and Worcester; Austin Craig’s biography of Rizal, and all volumes of Blair and Robertson’s The Philippine
Islands: 1493-1898. Another online archive you may use is Internet Archive (www.archive.org), an online library that
originally sought to archive web history, but grew later on to provide digital versions of other works; The archive
contains 279 billion web pages, 11 million books and texts, four million audio recordings, three million videos, one
million images, and 100,000 software programs.

PHILIPPINE GOVERNMENT WEBSITES

 (www.gov.ph)
 are starting to be enriched with sources that may be used for historical research, especially on laws and other
government issuances that may be useful when doing topics of a more contemporary period. Websites of
newspapers, magazines, broadcasting stations, and other media outlets usually keep an archive of their articles
from a particular date.
 For older issues, you may have to find copies, either digitized or physical copies, in the library.

LESSON 2
DOING HISTORICAL RESEARCH IN LIBRARIES AND ARCHIVES
 Research in libraries and archives is necessary in the study of history as these are repositories of primary and
secondary sources that allow us to create narratives of the past through accepted methods of historical scholarship.
 It is imperative upon students to be able to develop an aptitude toward doing research in these venues so as to
further develop their skills in historical research.

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ALDERSGATE COLLEGE READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY
COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND EDUCATION MARY GLENNE G. CAINAR

 Students of history are usually expected to write historical essays and/ or historical research papers, and this entails
the collection of data through primary sources.
 There are available primary sources on Philippine history online, however, much remains to be digitized and made
accessible to the public.
 Libraries and archives still provide more variety of sources in different formats such as books, journal articles,
newspapers, magazines, photographs, and even audio and video recordings.
 Nowadays, libraries have forgone the tedious and antiquated card cataloging system and have been using the
digital version to catalog their holdings, called the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), sometimes simply \ the
Library Catalog.
 In this system, instead of going through each entry on physical index cards, a simple search will yield the holdings
of the library related to what you are searching for.
 Searching by subject will give you a list of sources, primary and secondary, to aid you in. creating a preliminary
biography that you may later on access physically in the holdings of the library.
 A problem that could arise this way is when the search yields too many results—sifting through these may need a
more refined search.string using more definite keywords to limit the results. For example, “Philippine History” as a
search string would result in hundreds, even thousands of materials. Limit it to particular keywords that focus on
your topic, such as “Philippine Revolution,” “Emilio Aguinaldo“Declaration of Independence,” and other more
defined strings.
 The catalog lists down all kinds of materials available based on the subject used in the search. These could be
books, journals, maps, and other materials that fit what you might be looking for.
 Do not limit yourself to using books and other published materials when you may be able to utilize other forms of
sources.
 Materials that may be too old to be physically handled may also be available in digital form or microfilm.
 Research in archives may be a lot more difficult and prove to be too advanced, but will provide you with many
sources not available in the usual libraries.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE PHILIPPINES

 It is an agency of the government mandated to collect, store, preserve, and make available records of the
government and other primary sources pertaining to the history and development of the Philippines.
 Most of the materials here, especially for the years of Spanish colonialism, are in their original language -and may
not be accessible to college students. But other materials may be useful, and it would not hurt to ask assistance
from the staff in the archives.

LESSON 3
DOING LIFE HISTORIES AND BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH
 Studying history is always focused on history of nations and different collectives.
 Studying the life of an individual is often incidental to a greater event that has been significant to the life of a larger
unit that he or she happened to contribute to.
 Life history is an oft-neglected sub-discipline of history because it is seen as trivial to larger narratives of nations,
societies, and civilizations.
 However, students of history should realize, that the individual is a significant contributor to various historical
breakthroughs across periods of time.
 Individuals make up societies and individual actions can cause large-scale social change.
 Individuals’ influence can span centuries and generations. Individuals can also influence large spaces and many
places.

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ALDERSGATE COLLEGE READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY
COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND EDUCATION MARY GLENNE G. CAINAR

 For example, Jesus Christ as an individual, influenced the whole world. The faith and the religion that He
started also launched wars, created civilizations, lasted for many centuries, and persist up to the present.
 Jose Rizal, on the other hand, influenced many generations of Filipinos. His novels inspired radical Filipinos
to fight the colonizers, and his death was seen as the tipping point of the revolution. However, his influence
was limited to the Philippines.
 These examples are cases of exceptional individuals.
 History has proven that their lives, their exploits, and their legacies had a huge impact in the society where they
belonged.
 Nevertheless, the writing of life history should not be limited to great individuals like heroes, prophets, or world
leaders.
 Ordinary individuals should also be able to locate themselves in the pages of history.
 One should see himself as a part of a larger history and not as a separate and remote entity unaffected by what is
happening around him.
 Doing life histories should be accompanied by locating the life of the individual in the larger social life.
 Indeed, people’s interest in history can be perked up once they realize that their lives can be plotted alongside the
trajectory 6f history of a larger nation, society, or even local community.
 There is after all, a mutual constitution between history and biography. However, doing a life history is not an easy
task.
 The researcher should be able to identify different factors that affected the life of the person he is trying to study.
 Some social scientists would lament that studying individuals tend to be more complicated than studying societies.
Individuals are distinct, unique, and dynamic.
 The life historian or the biographer should identify aspects of the individual’s life in order to properly historicize his
life.
 For example, studying the life of Jose Rizal does not only require looking at big events in his life that
affected the nascent nation, like the publication of his novels, his exile to Dapitan, or his execution in
Bagumbayan.
 Family is an important aspect of an individual. It determines the person’s socioeconomic status, religious belief,
character, interests, and values.
 Institutions where the individual belonged should also be looked at in studying his life history.
 If the family and the community where he belonged will give us clues about his early life, the latter stages of his life
can be understood with certain activities and learning that he had as he affiliated in different institutions like schools,
organizations, fraternity, church, and interest groups.

LESSON 4
DOING LOCAL AND ORAL HISTORY
The history subjects and courses usually taught to students in schools are Philippine history, world history, and history
of Asia. The coverage is always expansive and taught in broad strokes of historical periods, of large spaces, and of
prominent personalities.'

LOCAL HISTORY
 It is the study of the history of a particular community or a smaller unit of geography. Debates, however,
continuously persist on the definition of this sub-discipline, particularly in the subject of its study.
 Local historians study the history of local institutions like churches.
 They also study the local economies, local heroes, and local events.
 It is also a broad and dynamic field of inquiry that aims to have an in-depth understanding of a certain locale.

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ALDERSGATE COLLEGE READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY
COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND EDUCATION MARY GLENNE G. CAINAR

 It can serve as a balancer of these tendencies by showing the peculiarities in certain locales in a particular nation,
region, or continent.
 Studying this can provide new and alternative interpretations on the different aspects of a nation’s history.
 It also facilitates a historical narrative emanating from the people. Historians call this the history from below.
 Ultimately, studying this shall provide new provisions and perspectives on the already established national history.
 It is not just aimed at opposing the discourse in the national histories but is also a tool of enriching these national
narratives.
 Doing local history, however, is not an easy task. Despite the seemingly smaller scope of study, historians are often
faced with challenges in locating sources for local and specific objects of study.

ORAL HISTORY
 It is important in the midst of scarcity in written sources, historical documents, and other material evidences.
 This method uses oral accounts of historical subjects, witnesses, members of the communities, and the like.
 It primarily relies on memory.
 The subject or the informant will recount his experiences to the researcher as he remembers it.
 In other instances, the informant will relay what he learned from his ancestors or older members of the community
to the historian.
 This nature and definition of oral history caused positivist historians or those who subscribe to the belief that history
should be primarily based on written documents to criticize the methods of oral history.
 Memory is seen as something that is faulty and inaccurate. At best, positivist historians see oral accounts as mere
supplement to the history written from written -documents.
 However, one cannot discount the importance of oral history in writing the history of underprivileged sectors and
communities like the urban poor or indigenous peoples.
 These groups are usually left out on records. They were undocumented because of their status.
 In these instances, it is the task of the historian to search for alternative methods that will capture the experience
and collective pasts, of these communities. Oral history plays this role.

LOCAL AND ORAL HISTORY

 are important endeavors in the development and enrichment in the discipline of history. These efforts fill the gaps in
the discipline by highlighting alternative areas of study and methodology toward a more holistic, inclusive, and
progressive study of our past.

LESSON 5
INTERACTING WITH HISTORY THROUGH HISTORICAL SHRINES AND MUSEUMS
 These venues for living history provide us a certain level of authority and trustworthiness that could impact the way
we view the past.
 Through interacting with artifacts such as a World War II rifle or the clothes of a Filipino hero, we can better imagine
the past beyond the mere letter and words we read and painstakingly memorize.
 These tangible objects are reconstructions of the past; experiencing these artifacts directly is the next best thing to
actually being there when a particular event happened or a when a historical personality lived. These firsthand
experiences make historical events more real for us; and research shows that learning by experiencing aids with
retention of the learning later in life.
 Historical shrines and museums serve as portals to the past. But one must also take note that visiting a museum
entails preparation.
 Upon arriving in the historical shrine or museum, one thing that you can do is to look for the historical marker.

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ALDERSGATE COLLEGE READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY
COLLEGE OF ARTS, SCIENCES AND EDUCATION MARY GLENNE G. CAINAR

 These markers put up by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP, or formerly National
Historical Institute or NHI) provide the basic details on what makes a certain site historical.
 These markers ensure that the site where it is located is indeed, of historical and cultural value to the nation.

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