Hist1 M1 L2 ContentContext

HIST 1 STUDY GUIDE | Content
and Context Analysis
🧩 🎨 🖼❓
Content and Context Analysis
Introduction, p. 1
Key Concepts, p. 1
Learning Resources, pp. 1-3
Study Questions, p. 4
Learning Activity, pp. 4-9
References, p. 9

INTRODUCTION
In the past lesson, we learned the difference between primary and secondary sources. We also learned
about different types of primary sources, and we practiced “writing history” using each type. These sources
are the building blocks used to put history together, and so we must know how to read for ourselves what
sources have to say, especially primary sources. We must also know when and how to use secondary sources,
which will then help us figure out how multiple different primary sources fit together.
The following lesson on content and context will train us further in the reading of sources in history. The
two terms will be differentiated, then there is a guide provided for studying the content and context of a
source. The lesson is good for 1-2 hours. Shall we start?

KEY CONCEPTS
Content, context, perspective, bias, authenticity, provenance, credibility, bigger picture

LEARNING RESOURCES
No matter how alike two people might be, they will never see something in the exact same way. The same
applies in history. Even if two people live in the same neighborhood and during the same timeframe, it does
not guarantee that they will write about an event that affects them in the exact same way. This is because of
many factors shaping and influencing people’s worldviews and biases.
And even when we interpret evidences of an event in the past, our biases come into play, because the
factors shaping them are sometimes more subtle than we realize. Our upbringing or the way we were raised
makes us biased in a certain way; so does our place of origin, and the languages we speak. We can also be
biased because of our age, our gender, our religion, and even because of the school we’re enrolled in.
Since we are in a college-level history class, we have to be aware of the existence of bias now more than
ever. Our version of Philippine history has to be more intelligent than how it was in grade school and high
school.
So how do we accomplish that? At this point, it is important that we know how to read the sources with
which we create our history. And we begin by knowing the difference between CONTENT and CONTEXT. Mind
the spelling!

Except where otherwise noted, the contents of this Study Guide are licensed to Ena Jessa Kristine Jarales
under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1
Only for classroom purposes for the Hist 01 subject at Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan.
HIST 1 STUDY GUIDE | Content and Context Analysis
CONTEXT
CONTENT What the source does not actually say;
What the source itself
actually says Everything else around that source, including:
1) the events that produced that source;
2) events that resulted from that source
being created; and
3) other sources that may be connected to
the original source

How else do the two words differ?
o CONTENT – We’re referring to what is literally in the source: the who, what, when, where, etc. We are
interested in what the source is, by itself.

o CONTEXT – We’re referring to the surroundings or the outside of the source, or the bigger picture to
which the source belongs. This is what gives meaning to the content of the source we’re studying.

If you need to visualize some more, think of a jigsaw puzzle piece. By itself, the purple
puzzle piece already has something to say: it has a distinct color, a texture, and a shape that
all mean something. But by knowing how it fits with the orange, white, and yellow pieces,
we can understand better and even verify the purple piece’s other possible meanings.

Is this clear?
By analyzing both content and context, our understanding of history becomes much deeper. If you practice
this method of analysis often enough, you also learn not to take any slice of knowledge for granted anymore,
which is always a plus.
Now let’s look at some guide questions for studying content and context. There are three (3) sets of
questions we shall work with. They apply best to the analysis of primary sources, but we can also ask the same
questions when reading secondary sources.

Set One
(for Content – Authenticity and Provenance)
These questions will establish the authenticity and provenance of a primary source. In other words,
they will help us determine whether a source is legit, by asking where it comes from.
à What type of primary source is it? What are its physical characteristics? Is it made of paper,
wood, stone, etc.? Is it 3.51 inches long and 5.79 inches wide? How would you describe the item to
someone who has never seen it before?
à When and where was it produced?

à What was the source’s original form? If you’re only studying a photocopy, what was it originally?
Was it a printed book or a piece of cloth or a moldy parchment paper?
à Who was the author or maker of the source? What is their background? This is the part that
requires the most research, because we’re looking for the factors shaping the author’s biases. In
order to do that, we need to find as much of their background as possible.
Set Two
(for Content – Credibility)
These questions will help us determine the credibility of a primary source, meaning whether or not it
is believable.
à What are the source’s main points? What is it about?
à For whom was it intended? What perspective or point-of-view does it use? Do we have an
outsider trying to explain an event to a foreign audience, or a native explaining what happened to
future generations of his own people? This is the part that requires us to be aware especially of the
language used in the source, because language is itself an indicator of bias.
à What are the author or maker’s possible motives for making the source? Sometimes a source
will explicitly explain why it was made, so you will need to quote or pinpoint evidences from the
source itself.
à Are any parts of the source inconsistent with each other? Does Josefina say something on page
10 but then suddenly say the opposite on page 314? This part matters because it tells us if the item
we’re studying is a good source of information or not.
Set Three
(for Context)
These questions ask about the context, or the bigger picture.
à What does the source tell us about the period it is from? If a letter to Marina mentions a number
of people getting the same hairstyle, it tells us that hairstyle must’ve been popular during that
time. Or if a receipt indicates the price of a bottle of Pepsi, it gives us an idea of how much items
cost back then.
à What questions would you personally like to ask the author or maker of the source?
à What questions does the source leave unanswered?
à Does anything in the source contradict or not fit with the period it claims to be from? Does an
autobiography mention Paulito using a telephone in the year 1632, when telephones were not yet
invented?
STUDY QUESTIONS
You may choose to answer the following questions mentally, or use this opportunity to write your answer
down in a notebook and rest your eyes from the computer screen.
1. How are the emojis on the front page related to today’s lesson? Use your imagination!
2. What do we look at when we study the content of a source? What do we look at when we study the
context?
3. The Belarussian-American entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk is quoted as having said, “Content is king,
but context is God.” How does this quote apply to our lesson?
4. What are the dangers of taking something out of context, or studying a source’s content but neglecting
its context? Have you ever had an experience where you took information from someone out of
context, or vice versa?
If you’re having difficulty making sense of the questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with your teacher and
classmates! J

LEARNING ACTIVITY
Let’s practice analyzing the content and context of actual primary sources in
Philippine history. Using the guide questions provided in the previous pages, study the
three (3) sources below and write an original analysis for each one.
If you would like a copy of the guide questions to keep handy in your device as you
write your analyses, you can scan the QR code to download the checklist designed by Ms. Ena Jarales.

Letter of José Rizal to Alfredo

Hidalgo
Dapitan, 20 December 1893.
To Master Alfredo Hidalgo.
My dear Alfredo : I was very glad to read
your letter and see how much progress you
have made. I congratulate you for that and for
your excellent grade. I think I should call your
attention to a slight mistake you made in your
letter, a mistake which many commit in
society. One does not say, “I and my brothers
send our greetings,” but “my brothers and I send
our greetings.” You must always put yourself
last; you must say: Emilio and I, you and I, my
friend and I, etc.
For the rest, your letter lacks nothing in
clearness, conciseness, and orthography. Go
ahead, then; study, study and think well over
what you have studied; life is a very serious
matter, and only those with intelligence and heart go through it worthily. To live is to be among men,
and to be among men is to struggle. But this struggle is not a brutal, material struggle with other men
alone: it is a struggle with them but also with one’s self, with others’ passions but also with one’s own,
with errors and with preoccupations. It is an eternal struggle, [which one must bear] with a smile on
one’s lips and tears in one’s heart. On this battlefield man has no better weapon than his intelligence,
no other force but his heart. Sharpen, perfect, and polish therefore your mind, and fortify and educate
your heart.
Enough for now. I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Good New Year.
Your uncle who loves you,
JOSÉ RIZAL.
Three Filipinas in fancy dress

Work Title: “Three Filipinas in fancy dress”
Source Collection: Tiffany Williams Photograph Collection
Source Date: 1895

Note: In analyzing the content and
context of any visual material, the
guide questions provided will still be
applicable.
Speech of President C. Aquino

Delivered during the Joint Session of the United States Congress at Washington DC, on September 18, 1986
Mr. Speaker, Senator Thurman, distinguished members of Congress:
Three years ago, I left America in grief to bury my husband, Ninoy Aquino. I thought I had left it
also to lay to rest his restless dream of Philippine freedom. Today, I have returned as the president of a
free people.
In burying Ninoy, a whole nation honored him. By that brave and selfless act of giving honor, a
nation in shame recovered its own. A country that had lost faith in its future found it in a faithless and
brazen act of murder. So in giving, we receive, in losing we find, and out of defeat, we snatched our
victory.
For the nation, Ninoy became the pleasing sacrifice that answered their prayers for freedom. For
myself and our children, Ninoy was a loving husband and father. His loss, three times in our lives, was
always a deep and painful one.
Fourteen years ago this month was the first time we lost him. A president-turned-dictator, and
traitor to his oath, suspended the Constitution and shut down the Congress that was much like this one
before which I am honored to speak. He detained my husband along with thousands of others –
senators, publishers and anyone who had spoken up for the democracy as its end drew near. But for
Ninoy, a long and cruel ordeal was reserved. The dictator already knew that Ninoy was not a body
merely to be imprisoned but a spirit he must break. For even as the dictatorship demolished one by one
the institutions of democracy – the press, the Congress, the independence of the judiciary, the
protection of the Bill of Rights – Ninoy kept their spirit alive in himself.
The government sought to break him by indignities and terror. They locked him up in a tiny, nearly
airless cell in a military camp in the north. They stripped him naked and held the threat of sudden
midnight execution over his head. Ninoy held up manfully under all of it. I barely did as well. For 43
days, the authorities would not tell me what had happened to him. This was the first time my children
and I felt we had lost him.
When that didn’t work, they put him on trial for subversion, murder and a host of other crimes
before a military commission. Ninoy challenged its authority and went on a fast. If he survived it, then,
he felt, God intended him for another fate. We had lost him again. For nothing would hold him back from
his determination to see his fast through to the end. He stopped only when it dawned on him that the
government would keep his body alive after the fast had destroyed his brain. And so, with barely any
life in his body, he called off the fast on the fortieth day. God meant him for other things, he felt. He did
not know that an early death would still be his fate, that only the timing was wrong.
At any time during his long ordeal, Ninoy could have made a separate peace with the dictatorship,
as so many of his countrymen had done. But the spirit of democracy that inheres in our race and
animates this chamber could not be allowed to die. He held out, in the loneliness of his cell and the
frustration of exile, the democratic alternative to the insatiable greed and mindless cruelty of the right
and the purging holocaust of the left.
And then, we lost him, irrevocably and more painfully than in the past. The news came to us in
Boston. It had to be after the three happiest years of our lives together. But his death was my country’s
resurrection in the courage and faith by which alone they could be free again. The dictator had called
him a nobody. Yet two million people threw aside their passivity and fear and escorted him to his grave.
And so began the revolution that has brought me to democracy’s most famous home, the Congress of
the United States.
The task had fallen on my shoulders to continue offering the democratic alternative to our people.
Archibald Macleish had said that democracy must be defended by arms when it is attacked by arms
and by truth when it is attacked by lies. He failed to say how it shall be won.
I held fast to Ninoy’s conviction that it must be by the ways of democracy. I held out for
participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship called, even if I knew it would be rigged. I was warned
by the lawyers of the opposition that I ran the grave risk of legitimizing the foregone results of elections
that were clearly going to be fraudulent. But I was not fighting for lawyers, but for the people in whose
intelligence I had implicit faith. By the exercise of democracy, even in a dictatorship, they would be
prepared for democracy when it came. And then, also, it was the only way I knew by which we could
measure our power even in the terms dictated by the dictatorship.
The people vindicated me in an election shamefully marked by government thuggery and fraud.
The opposition swept the elections, garnering a clear majority of the votes, even if they ended up, thanks
to a corrupt Commission on Elections, with barely a third of the seats in parliament. Now, I knew our
power.
Last year, in an excess of arrogance, the dictatorship called for its doom in a snap election. The
people obliged. With over a million signatures, they drafted me to challenge the dictatorship. And I
obliged. The rest is the history that dramatically unfolded on your television screen and across the front
pages of your newspapers.
You saw a nation, armed with courage and integrity, stand fast by democracy against threats and
corruption. You saw women poll watchers break out in tears as armed goons crashed the polling places
to steal the ballots but, just the same, they tied themselves to the ballot boxes. You saw a people so
committed to the ways of democracy that they were prepared to give their lives for its pale imitation.
At the end of the day, before another wave of fraud could distort the results, I announced the people’s
victory.
Many of you here today played a part in changing the policy of your country towards us. We, the
Filipinos, thank each of you for what you did: for, balancing America’s strategic interest against human
concerns, illuminates the American vision of the world.
The distinguished co-chairman of the United States observer team in his report to your President
described that victory:
“I was witness to an extraordinary manifestation of democracy on the part of the Filipino people.
The ultimate result was the election of Mrs. Corazon C. Aquino as President and Mr. Salvador Laurel as
Vice-President of the Philippines.”
When a subservient parliament announced my opponent’s victory, the people turned out in the
streets and proclaimed me President. And true to their word, when a handful of military leaders
declared themselves against the dictatorship, the people rallied to their protection. Surely, the people
take care of their own. It is on that faith and the obligation it entails, that I assumed the presidency.
As I came to power peacefully, so shall I keep it. That is my contract with my people and my
commitment to God. He had willed that the blood drawn with the lash shall not, in my country, be paid
by blood drawn by the sword but by the tearful joy of reconciliation.
We have swept away absolute power by a limited revolution that respected the life and freedom of
every Filipino. Now, we are restoring full constitutional government. Again, as we restored democracy
by the ways of democracy, so are we completing the constitutional structures of our new democracy
under a constitution that already gives full respect to the Bill of Rights. A jealously independent
Constitutional Commission is completing its draft which will be submitted later this year to a popular
referendum. When it is approved, there will be congressional elections. So within about a year from a
peaceful but national upheaval that overturned a dictatorship, we shall have returned to full
constitutional government. Given the polarization and breakdown we inherited, this is no small
achievement.
My predecessor set aside democracy to save it from a communist insurgency that numbered less
than 500. Unhampered by respect for human rights, he went at it with hammer and tongs. By the time
he fled, that insurgency had grown to more than 16,000. I think there is a lesson here to be learned
about trying to stifle a thing with the means by which it grows.
I don’t think anybody, in or outside our country, concerned for a democratic and open Philippines,
doubts what must be done. Through political initiatives and local reintegration programs, we must seek
to bring the insurgents down from the hills and, by economic progress and justice, show them that for
which the best intentioned among them fight.
As President, I will not betray the cause of peace by which I came to power. Yet equally, and again
no friend of Filipino democracy will challenge this, I will not stand by and allow an insurgent leadership
to spurn our offer of peace and kill our young soldiers, and threaten our new freedom.
Yet, I must explore the path of peace to the utmost for at its end, whatever disappointment I meet
there, is the moral basis for laying down the olive branch of peace and taking up the sword of war. Still,
should it come to that, I will not waver from the course laid down by your great liberator: “With malice
towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the rights as God gives us to see the rights, let us
finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the
battle, and for his widow and for his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Like Lincoln, I understand that force may be necessary before mercy. Like Lincoln, I don’t relish it.
Yet, I will do whatever it takes to defend the integrity and freedom of my country.
Finally, may I turn to that other slavery: our $26 billion foreign debt. I have said that we shall honor
it. Yet must the means by which we shall be able to do so be kept from us? Many conditions imposed on
the previous government that stole this debt continue to be imposed on us who never benefited from
it. And no assistance or liberality commensurate with the calamity that was visited on us has been
extended. Yet ours must have been the cheapest revolution ever. With little help from others, we
Filipinos fulfilled the first and most difficult conditions of the debt negotiation: the full restoration of
democracy and responsible government. Elsewhere, and in other times of more stringent world
economic conditions, Marshall Plans and their like were felt to be necessary companions of returning
democracy.
When I met with President Reagan yesterday, we began an important dialogue about cooperation
and the strengthening of the friendship between our two countries. That meeting was both a
confirmation and a new beginning and should lead to positive results in all areas of common concern.
Today, we face the aspirations of a people who had known so much poverty and massive
unemployment for the past 14 years and yet offered their lives for the abstraction of democracy.
Wherever I went in the campaign, slum area or impoverished village, they came to me with one cry:
democracy! Not food, although they clearly needed it, but democracy. Not work, although they surely
wanted it, but democracy. Not money, for they gave what little they had to my campaign. They didn’t
expect me to work a miracle that would instantly put food into their mouths, clothes on their back,
education in their children, and work that will put dignity in their lives. But I feel the pressing obligation
to respond quickly as the leader of a people so deserving of all these things.
We face a communist insurgency that feeds on economic deterioration, even as we carry a great
share of the free world defenses in the Pacific. These are only two of the many burdens my people carry
even as they try to build a worthy and enduring house for their new democracy, that may serve as well
as a redoubt for freedom in Asia. Yet, no sooner is one stone laid than two are taken away. Half our
export earnings, $2 billion out of $4 billion, which was all we could earn in the restrictive markets of
the world, went to pay just the interest on a debt whose benefit the Filipino people never received.
Still, we fought for honor, and, if only for honor, we shall pay. And yet, should we have to wring the
payments from the sweat of our men’s faces and sink all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two
hundred fifty years of unrequited toil?
Yet to all Americans, as the leader of a proud and free people, I address this question: has there
been a greater test of national commitment to the ideals you hold dear than that my people have gone
through? You have spent many lives and much treasure to bring freedom to many lands that were
reluctant to receive it. And here you have a people who won it by themselves and need only the help to
preserve it.
Three years ago, I said thank you, America, for the haven from oppression, and the home you gave
Ninoy, myself and our children, and for the three happiest years of our lives together. Today, I say, join
us, America, as we build a new home for democracy, another haven for the oppressed, so it may stand
as a shining testament of our two nations’ commitment to freedom.

If you would like to listen to President Aquino deliver the speech while you’re
reading the transcript, you can scan the QR code to open the video of the speech on
YouTube. Aquino begins speaking at the 3:02 mark.
Note: Be careful about believing only what the comments section says about the speech. There
are actually important points in the speech that were not noted by the good people of YouTube.
J

REFERENCES
Aquino, Corazon C. “Speech of Her Excellency Corazon C. Aquino during the Joint Session of the United States
Congress.” Transcript of speech delivered at Washington DC, September 18, 1986.
https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1986/09/18/speech-of-president-corazon-aquino-during-the-
joint-session-of-the-u-s-congress-september-18-1986/.
---. “Speech of Her Excellency Corazon C. Aquino during the Joint Session of the United States Congress.”
Washington DC, filmed September 18, 1986. Video of speech, 29:28.
https://youtu.be/4ZnnvbKyNCQ.
Rizal, José. Letter to Alfredo Hidalgo, December 20, 1893.
[“Three Filipinas in fancy dress.”] Photograph. 1895. From University of Michigan Special Collections
Research Center – Philippine Photographs Digital Archive – Tiffany Williams Photograph Collection.
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclphilimg/x-1885/phlg018.

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HIST 1 STUDY GUIDE | Content

and Context Analysis

à When and where was it produced?

Letter of José Rizal to Alfredo

Three Filipinas in fancy dress

Speech of President C. Aquino

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