HISTORY

Balbar, Mary Jane C.

Balabat, Danica Rose
Burgos, Angielyn
Castanos, Jasel Ann Mae
Del Mundo, Mary Grace U.
Pojas, John Caleb A.

BEED 4-1D
What is History?

History was long regarded as the principal school subject in the field of human
relationships. Increased attention to geography, the gradual separation of civics from history, and
the introduction of sociology and economics into school programs made it necessary to think in
terms of a group of social studies instead of the single subject of history. The rise of the field of
the social studies has caused some uneasiness as to its significance and as to its effects upon
the study of history. This discussion is designed to clarify the term and restate the relationship of
history to the other social studies.

The report on history is concerned mainly with those persons—inside, but also outside,
the historical profession—who are engaged in historical work of a social science character, and
with that part of historical study and training that falls within the scope of social science. This focus
has no invidious implications. On the contrary, the diversity of historical work reflects the diversity
of the historian’s interests and of the evidence available to him; this diversity is a valuable, even
indispensable, feature of the discipline.

Because history is not a unitary discipline, however, an inquiry of this kind assumes a
special character. It cannot simply be addressed by the profession to the outside world. Instead
it is addressed on behalf of one segment of the profession to both the discipline and the outside
world. We have tried to convey the state of that part of history that is or would be social science,
and to offer recommendations that would promote and improve this kind of work. As will be seen,
many historians are inclined to greet such recommendations with doubt, scorn, anxiety, or
hostility.

We believe the promotion of social scientific history is in the interest of all historians. The
changing character of historical evidence, the development of new techniques and concepts in
related disciplines, the growing body of research by non-historians into historical problems—all
these imply that even those historians who are not themselves working in social science have to
learn to read it and use it, if only to teach their students.

What is more, most of the material facilities required to promote social scientific history
are by their nature facilities for the entire discipline. Better libraries, easier retrieval and
dissemination of data, more generous arrangements for pre- and postdoctoral research, and
similar improvements redound directly or indirectly to the benefit of all.

In return, these gains are dependent on the cooperation of all, for students of history as
social science will always need training in all aspects of the discipline. If anything, the growing
sophistication of social scientific techniques makes it all the more important for practitioners of
these techniques to know and appreciate the humanistic approach to historical knowledge. We
cannot afford to gain a world of numbers and models, only to lose our historical souls in the
process.

There is already a large body of literature on the nature and method of history. There have
been published in recent years a number of essays on the relation of history to social science.
Many of these raise difficult epistemological questions about the nature of truth and evidence that
we prefer to avoid. We have barely touched the classic questions of historical knowledge: To what
degree can the historian ever free himself from the biases of his own time and place? Should he?
Is there a special mode of historical knowledge based on empathy—the ability to put oneself into
the skins of other people in other times and places? Are there laws, cycles, repetitions, irreversible
trends in history? We have not seriously examined the role of historical thinking and materials
outside the discipline of history—an important question in a day when economists, sociologists,
political scientists, and many others are attempting to work with historical evidence. Instead, we
have concentrated our attention on history as a discipline and profession, with special attention
to the social scientific sector, loosely defined. The kinds of questions we ask are: Who are the
historians? What do they do? How do they work? What do they want and need? And what can be
done about it?

The first large section of the report treats the discipline of history in general and seeks to
define the characteristics of social scientific history in terms of ideal types. It includes summary
findings of a survey of about six hundred working historians which the panel undertook in the
spring of 1968. The next section describes some of the varieties of social scientific history, their
achievements, limitations, and promise. Then we turn to the resources, working, and needs of the
profession—first in teaching, then in research. A special section is devoted to library problems;
another, to the role of foreign scholars. Finally, we sum up the observations and recommendations
made along the way.

The Status of History within the Social Studies

There is a widespread notion that history, particularly American history, is being squeezed
out of the curriculum in both the schools and the colleges. The assumed cause for this assumed
calamity is the mere existence of the field of the social studies. What are the facts?

The recognition of the social studies field with the attendant rise of economics, sociology,
social problems, and other studies inevitably lessened the prominence and predominance of
history. Some educators and historians have argued that the addition of new subjects to the
curriculum necessarily lessened the time devoted to history. The elimination of English history,
the merging of ancient and medieval history, and the subsequent substitution of a one-year course
in world history for the two-year cycle in European history do seem to imply lessened attention to
the subjects. The loss is more apparent than real, however, for few students elected the two-year
cycle in European history, whereas world history has become a requirement in many schools.
Though the change in the program makes it appear that history has suffered an enormous loss,
the number of pupils who study world history compares favorably with the number of those who
formerly studied one or the other of the courses in the two-year sequence.

Whatever may be the status of European history, American history has made steady
gains. It has gained in time allotment and in absolute and relative enrollment, and it has become
a generally required subject in both the elementary and the high schools. The data supporting
these statements appear in Chapter III. Here it is sufficient to point out that whatever loss history
may have suffered has not been at the expense of the history of the United States.
 Furthermore, American history is receiving not only more formal recognition, but also more
attention within other subjects. Numerous topics and units in economics, sociology, government,
modern problems, and other subjects draw heavily from history. Such topics as immigration,
foreign trade, international relations, the tariff, world resources, transportation, and dozens of
others cannot be taught without extensive use of history. One may question the accuracy and
adequacy of the history learned by this indirect method, but no one can deny that large elements
of modern and contemporary history are involved in the study of these topics.

While history so labelled may receive less class time than it did twenty years ago, the
social studies as a whole have received increased attention. Before that time geography, civics,
and history were in the program, but they continued to be more or less unrelated subjects. The
rise of the social studies field convinced school administrators and teachers of the desirability of
providing a systematic sequence of social subjects, one for each grade level. Thus the aggregate
time which is devoted to the social studies is far greater than the time formerly devoted to the
separate subjects of civics, geography, and history.

The conclusions about the status of history within the social studies are (1) the aggregate
time devoted to the social studies is on the increase; (2) European history at the high-school level
has suffered a loss in time allotment, but not necessarily in enrollment; and (3) American history
has not only maintained its status but has actually received increased attention in the middle
grades, at the junior-high-school level, in the senior high school, and in college.

The Nature of History

If we are to concentrate on history as social science, we need some sense of what sets
history off from other social sciences. The contribution of history is perspective. This is no small
matter. It is only too easy and tempting for each generation (especially the more sensitive
members of each generation) to see the tests and troubles of its own time as unique. For many,
what is past is past, what matters is now and sometimes later. This is particularly true of social
engineers who, however much they may be motivated by the recollection of past wrongs, do not
want to be discouraged by the record of past mistakes. In defense of this “ostrich approach,” it
must be admitted that history has been misused as a stick to beat reformers and block change.

Yet never is the perspective of history so valuable as when men try to shape their destiny,
that is, try to change history. Then, if ever, man has to know how he came to this pass; otherwise
he is condemned to repeat his errors or at best to blunder through one difficulty only to arrive at
another. In this sense history, if read correctly, should help make men wise. Not everyone would
agree. There has always been a body of opinion within the historical profession that has denied
the possibility of an objective history—for the very cogent reason that it is simply impossible for
the historian to perceive the past except through eyes distorted by personal values and
sympathies. Each man, in this view, is his own historian. As for the lessons of history, men choose
these to their purpose. De Gaulle called on France’s tradition of greatness and power to justify
his break with NATO; his adversaries pointed to the experience of two world wars to show the
necessity of European cooperation. Israelis cite Jewish history to demonstrate the justice and
passion of their attachment to the Holy Land; Palestinians point to their own history—as recorded
in the Bible—to argue that they were there first. Some supporters of the American military
intervention in Vietnam have drawn an analogy to Munich and the appeasement of the 1930s to
justify firmness in the face of totalitarian aggression; some of their opponents have gone back to
ancient Athens for lessons in the folly of arrogance.

History is not alone in this respect. One could cite any number of other examples of self-
serving analogy, even of conflicting inferences from the same body of evidence, from any of the
behavioral and social sciences. Indeed, a lawyer might remark that this is the human condition:
people will always see things differently—that is what keeps the courts busy.

It would be a serious mistake, however, to infer from these difficulties that our ignorance
is inevitable and irreducible. Just as courts have developed over time adversary procedures and
principles of evidence designed to promote the pursuit of truth and justice, so social scientists,
including historians, have invented techniques for the collection, verification, and appraisal of
evidence as a means of understanding man’s motivations and behavior. The understanding that
results cannot be complete or definitive: the social scientist typically deals with a realm of
probability, but as his techniques have become more refined and powerful, the probabilities and
usefulness of his answers have increased.

The gains have been greatest in those areas where the social scientist has been able to
simplify his problems by exclusion of all but a few paramount variables. The best example is
economics. History, by comparison, has and always will have a hard time: the matter to be studied
is inherently complex (some would say, infinitely complex) and resistant to simplification. That,
however, only makes the task harder and the results of inquiry necessarily looser. It does not rule
out a closer approach to the goal of truth.

Historians have often treated the complexity and particularity of their material as a good
in itself. They have pursued the essential wisdom by immersing themselves in a particular time
and place until they absorb its ethos, its rules of action, its everyday routines. The deep immersion
sometimes produces marvelous reconstructions of the past, as when a Jacob Burkhardt takes us
to Renaissance Italy. It also has a “privatizing” effect: historical work becomes an intensely
personal thing and hence indivisible, noninterchangeable, perhaps even incommunicable.

This point of view has interesting consequences for the historian’s attitude toward
research as an activity competing with other activities for scarce time. If the product of research
is personal, it is not necessarily cumulative or additive. Some research is worth doing because of
the subject and the person doing it, but much work is a waste of time, the writer’s and the readers’.
Hence the remark of one of our correspondents:

For similar reasons historians are often suspicious of courses in methodology and hostile
to any kind of normalization of research procedure. If historiography is art, it cannot and must not
be reduced to some kind of routine.

These values have, to be sure, a strong intellectual justification. Insofar as history attempts
to see things whole, it is more dependent than other disciplines on individual perceptions.
Interpretation and understanding are never routine; there are too many variables to reduce the
analysis to some kind of procedure. Hence it is important that each scholar dig down to bedrock.
He comes with new questions and concepts to old material as well as new; and if he permits
himself to rely entirely on the ruminations of others, he has given half the game away.

It is one thing to justify this attitude in principle, however, and another to establish it as a
moral absolute. Nothing comes free, and the insistence on “original” research is bought at a price.
No other discipline builds so slowly, because the members of no other discipline are so reluctant
as historians to stand on the shoulders of others. All historians can recall criticisms of colleagues
and students on the ground that their work was too derivative at one point or another, that it relied
too heavily on secondary sources.

A look at historians

In April and May, 1968, the History Panel mailed a short questionnaire to about one
thousand regular members of the history departments of twenty-nine American colleges and
universities. Over the next six weeks, roughly six hundreds of those historians returned usable
questionnaires, forty sent word of their refusal or inability to answer, one hundred replied in some
other form, and two hundred and sixty did not respond at all. In the selection of departments the
Panel intentionally emphasized large, prestigious graduate departments, but also included six
good institutions where there was little or no training of graduate students in history. The twenty-
nine departments together gave 64 percent of the PhDs in history granted in the United States
during 1960–66.

The topographic map of the profession that emerges shows a rough, uneven terrain. Four
fundamental features are shown by the data: (1) a rather unequal distribution of historical
specialties among different sorts of departments and academic positions; (2) wide variation in
research interests, needs, and support according to special field, type of institution, and position
within the institution; (3) a standard life cycle of research experience; (4) some change in these
matters from one generation of historians to the next. Let us examine each of these briefly.

Within the sample, African and Asian historians are disproportionately concentrated in the
institutions with highest prestige, West European historians in the smaller liberal arts colleges,
intellectual historians in both, rather than in the departments of middling reputation.

Historians of Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe fairly frequently had affiliations with
research centers in their institutions, while historians of the United States or Western Europe
rarely had such affiliations. Yet the latter groups show the highest proportions of full professors,
while the newer fields of East European, Asian, African, and Latin American history include many
of lesser rank. Likewise, diplomatic historians, economic historians, and the much younger group
of historians of science are concentrated in the senior ranks, while political, social, and intellectual
historians generally occupy the junior positions. Thus an economic historian of Asia (to take an
extreme case) is likely to hold senior appointments in both a department of history and a research
center in a high-prestige institution, and a historian of European science is likely to hold a similar
position without the research affiliation, while the odds are better that an American political
historian will hold high rank, without research appointment, in a less distinguished institution, and
that a Latin American social historian will hold a similar appointment at a lower rank. Since rank,
quality of institution, and research affiliation all affect the historian’s ability to get his work done,
the problems faced by specialists in the various fields differ considerably.

There are, for example, marked variations in research funds available to historians in
different fields, as shown by the data on funds received from outside the university between 1964
and 1967, reported by historians in the twenty-nine departments surveyed. Except for the history
of science (which is the best-supported field in almost every respect), the specialties receiving
heavier outside support are generally those connected with interdisciplinary research centers.
Among geographical specialists, historians of Latin America, Africa, and Asia do best. That is
partly because such specialists are more likely to undertake expensive forms of research in the
first place; it is also because more money is available for research on “exotic” areas or in
interdisciplinary fields like economic history. Over and above these differences by field, our data
show the decided advantage (not only in outside grants, but also in university support, teaching
load, and time released for research) of the historian in a high prestige institution or with a
research appointment.

On the whole, with the important exception of historians of science, the kinds of historians
who are best supported also show the closest ties to the behavioral and social sciences. About a
tenth of the historians in the sample have undergraduate degrees in behavioral and social science
fields other than history; around 7 percent have PhDs in those fields; and roughly a third claim
“substantial training” in at least one of them.

About three quarters of the historians queried said that at least one social science field
was “particularly important” to their own fields of interest, about two thirds expressed interest in a
social science summer training institute, and just over half would choose a social science field for
a full year’s additional training. Distinguishing between fields, we find that we can divide our
historians into three categories: uninterested, involved, and frustrated.

Historians of science and intellectual historians, especially those dealing with Europe and
North America, typify those with little social science training, little current contact with social
science fields, and little desire to change in this regard. Economic historians of the United States,
Latin America, or Asia provide a good example of the involved: likely to have substantial formal
training in economics, staying in contact with economics and economists, and interested in
extending their knowledge of social science. The frustrated are those with little previous social
science training who have come to think that it is vital to their own work: social historians of the
Americas tend to fall into this category. While in this case everything depends on the definitions,
it would not be outrageous to label a fifth of the historians answering our questionnaire
uninterested, another third involved, and nearly half of them frustrated.

A fairly standard life cycle of research also appears in the findings. Within the sample the
men just getting started tend to have heavy teaching loads, course assignments alien to their
research interests, and poor support for their research. Those who are farther along begin to
acquire funds, time off, and greater control over their teaching assignments, but also begin to feel
the pinch of administrative responsibilities and outside commitments to writing and public service.
The most senior historians are less likely to be involved in large and expensive research, although
they continue to bear the burden of administrative and outside commitments.
The more distinguished the institution and the closer the affiliation with a research institute, the
earlier the historian achieves the perquisites of seniority.

Finally, some features of the historical landscape are changing with time. Judging by age,
year of acquiring the PhD, or academic rank, we find senior historians concentrated in the
traditional fields of North American and West European history (especially diplomatic, intellectual,
and political history), and junior men in the newer specialties of East European, African, Asian,
and Latin American history. These latter fields include very few scholars who earned PhDs before
1945. In recent years Eastern Europe appears to have lost favor, but all the others have more
than their share of PhDs earned since 1962. So the very fields that involve their practitioners most
heavily in the behavioral and social sciences are the ones that are growing and are currently
staffed with junior men.

PHILIPPINE HISTORY
There are two theories on the origins of the first Filipinos, the inhabitants of what will later be
called the Philippine Islands and eventually the Republic of the Philippines.
In the beginning of the 3rd century, the inhabitants of Luzon island were in contact and trading
with East Asian sea-farers and merchants including the Chinese. In the 1400's the Japanese
also established a trading post at Aparri in Northern Luzon.

In 1380, Muslim Arabs arrived at the Sulu Archipelago and established settlements which
became mini-states ruled by a Datu. They introduced Islam in the southern parts of the
archipelago including some parts of Luzon and were under the control of the Muslim sultans of
Borneo. They had a significant influence over the region for a couple of hundreds years. The
Malay Muslims remained dominant in these parts until the 16th century.

In 1521, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer who was serving the Spanish crown,
landed in Samar Island on his voyage to circumvent the globe. He explored the islands and
named it Archipelago of San Lazaro. Magellan was killed during a rebellion led by a Datu
named Lapu Lapu in Mactan Island (adjacent to Cebu Island). Spain continued to send
expeditions to the island for financial gain and on the fourth expedition, Commander Ruy Lopez
de Villalobos, named the islands: Philippines, after Prince Philip (later King Philip II), heir to the
Spanish throne. Spain ruled the Philippines for 356 years.
In 1565, King Philip II appointed Miguel Lopez de Legazpi as the first Governor-General of the
Philippines. Legazpi chose Manila to be it's capital because of it's natural harbor. Spain's legacy
was the conversion of the people to Catholicism and the creation of the privileged landed class.
Because of abuses and suppression of the Spaniards, a Propaganda Movement emerged with
the aims for equality between Filipinos and Spaniards. The arrest of propagandist Dr. Jose
Rizal and execution in 1896 gave fresh momentum to Filipino rebels to fight against Spain.
The secret society of the Katipunan, founded by Andres Bonifacio attacked the Spanish
Garrison in San Juan with little success, while Katipuneros in Cavite Province headed by Emilio
Aguinaldo defeated the Guardia Civil in Cavite. Aguinaldo's victories lead him to be elected as
head of the Katipunan. The factions of Bonifacio & Aguinaldo fought and lead to the trial and
execution of Bonifacio on Aguinaldo's orders. Aguinaldo later drafted a constitution and
established the Republic of Biak-na-Bato in Bulacan province. In 1897, an impasse between the
Spanish government and Aguinaldo arose. After negotiations between the two sides, Aguinaldo
accepted an amnesty from the Spaniards and US$ 800,000.00 in exchange for his exile to Hong
Kong with his government.
Strategies in Teaching Philippine History

According to researchers in education and learning, the primary purpose of contemporary

education should focus on student’s independent activity balanced by team activity, an
organization of self-learning environments, and innovative and practical training, critical thinking,
initiative, and more. Since history is an essential component of education, teachers should
make the effort of engaging the students and entice them to understand history rather than
memorize it. In the 21st century, children have changed, and they need new approaches and
teaching strategies. Proving your students that history is far from being boring, you can tailor
interactive classes that go beyond manuals and sheets of dates and events. Let’s see five fun,
interactive strategies to make history classes educational, entertaining, and engaging!

A. Media

One of the essential interactive teaching styles and principles is the use of media and
technology in the classroom. The easiest way to keep students engaged in the history class is
to watch a movie together. Luckily, enough, Hollywood and the cinema industry does not find
history boring – on the contrary, moviemakers exploit significant events and historical periods to
educate viewers and thrill them at the same time.

B. Gamification

In education, gamification is an essential component – kids learn better and for more extended
periods if they play or have fun during the learning process. You have many ways to introduce
gamification in any learning environment and teaching session, but we will focus on teaching
history while tackling the most dreadful aspect of this class: learning of dates.

Admittedly, learning dates is just teaching months and years. Memorizing dates is fun and easy,
said no children ever, so you need to help them. Times in history are critical, obviously, but lists
of number strings do not help anyone

C. Visualization
Bring dull academic concepts to life with visual and practical learning experiences, helping your
students to understand how their schooling applies in the real-world.
Examples include using the interactive whiteboard to display photos, audio clips and videos, as
well as encouraging your students to get out of their seats with classroom experiments and local
field trips.