Name: Sean I.

Gonzales Year Level: 11

Section: Capella Date:9/25/21
Name of Activity: Synthesis Report Word Count: 625

Philippine History
In its broadest meaning, history is the study of past events. It generally presents the
known past. What is unknown is yet to be retrieved. The recording and analysis of
experiences of a society comprise the totality of a people’s history.

Expeditions, Entrenchment, and Spanish Colonial Rule, 1521-1862

From Indio to Filipino: Emergence of a Nation, 1862-1898
Americanization and its Discontents, 1899-1946

Discovery of the Philippines by the West and Revolution

The Philippines was claimed in the name of Spain in 1521 by Ferdinand Magellan, a
Portuguese explorer sailing for Spain, who named the islands after King Philip II of
Spain. They were then called Las Felipinas. By the 1830's Spanish culture and thought
had penetrated into Filipino culture to the extent that the Filipino people began thinking
about liberation from Spain. The government of Spain developed Filipino agriculture to
the point that it was self-sufficient.

After some attempts at independence, and an equal number of atrocities on the part of
Spain, Filipino Nationalists began to speak out. One of the most famous of the time was
Jose Rizal. He studied medicine at the University of Santo Tomas in the Philippines and
the University of Madrid. Rizal wrote two important novels that portrayed the abuses of
Spanish rule. Although the books were banned, they were smuggled into the Philippines
and widely read. On the night of his execution, on December 30, 1896, Rizal proclaimed
the Philippines "the Pearl of the Oriental Seas". His death is annually commemorated on
December 30.

Rizal's execution gave impetus to the revolution. Although the Filipino

rebels, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, did not win complete independence, the
Spanish were not able to end the rebellion. In December of 1897,
negotiations with Spain resulted in the Pact of Biak-na-Bato. All of the rebels were
granted amnesty and the leaders of the revolution returned in voluntary exile to Hong
Kong. While in Hong Kong, Aguinaldo and his compatriots designed what is today the
Philippine national flag.
The American Era and Independence

At the same time that the Philippines were fighting for independence, Cuba, also a
colony of Spain, was trying to liberate itself from Spanish rule. Cuba, however, had the
backing of the United States. When the American battleship, USS Maine, sank in the
Havana harbor, war between the United States and Spain became imminent.

On April 25, 1898, the United States declared war on Spain and the commander of the
U.S. Asiatic Squadron, Commodore George Dewey was sent to engage the Spanish navy
in the Philippines. Dewey attacked the Spanish fleet on the morning of May 1, 1898 from
his ship USS Olympia. The battle lasted only a few hours resulting in the complete
destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay. The American fleet suffered only minor
damage.

The Spanish-American war officially ended with the Treaty of Paris on December 10,
1898. However, the American government was only interested in Cuba's independence,
not that of the Philippines. By the Treaty, Cuba gained its independence and Spain ceded
the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico to the United States for the sum of US$20
million. Given its own history of colonial revolution, American opinion was
uncomfortable and divided on the moral principle of owning colonial dependencies.
Having acquired the Philippines almost by accident, the United States was not sure what
to do with them. On January 20, 1899, President McKinley appointed the First Philippine
Commission (Schurman Commission) to make recommendations.

The Treaty of Paris and subsequent actions by the United States were not well
received by the Filipinos - who were not even consulted. The Philippine War of
Independence began on February 4, 1899 and continued for two years. The United States
needed 126,000 soldiers to subdue the Philippines. The war took the lives of 4,234
Americans and 16,000 Filipinos. The Commonwealth of the Philippines was established
by the United States government in 1935 with a view to granting Filipino independence
within 10 years.

However, on December 8, 1941 ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the
Japanese military invaded the Philippines. United States forces under the command of
General Douglas MacArthur withdrew to Java on December 12, 1941. MacArthur
promised: "I shall return". General MacArthur kept his promise and returned with a
massive amphibious force on the island of Leyte in October of 1944. Over the next four
months, U.S. forces, with the help of Filipino guerrillas routed the Japanese army.

Expeditions, Entrenchment, and Spanish Colonial Rule, 1521-1862

In 1517, an intrepid and battle-tested thirty-nine-year-old Portuguese navigator by the

name of Ferdinand Magellan, out of favor with the crotchety Portuguese king Manuel,
crossed the border into Spain and convinced its young, adventurous seventeen-year-old
Hapsburg monarch, Charles, to finance an ambitious undertaking: He, Magellan, would
discover a new route to the fabled spice islands by sailing west across the Atlantic, to
South America, from where he could then sail to the desired destination without running
afoul of his countrymen, Spain’s fiercest rivals. Magellan assured the Spanish court that
his voyage would observe the line of demarcation Pope Alexander VI had drawn,
essentially dividing the planet between Catholic Spain and Catholic Portugal. Established
on June 7, 1494, the demarcation was one hundred leagues west of the Azores and Cape
Verde: All lands west were marked for Spain; east for Portugal. However, if land in
either half was already by a Christian sovereign, it was to be left alone.

Everything else was up for grabs. A simple enough agreement, yet the papal bull was
constantly challenged to suit the agenda either of the Portuguese or the Spanish. This
interminable wrangling led to modification through the 1506 Treaty of Tordesillas (a
smalltown in northern Spain). The line was moved 370 miles west of Cape Verde,
approximately in the middle of the Atlantic. The papal blessing provided Spain Portugal
with theological cover for their voyages of conquest and the brutal but profitable
undertaking of lang and expropriation and exploitation of indigenous peoples, otherwise
known as colonization. Through the conquistadors and the civil and religious personnel
that followed in lockstep, Rome extended its reach wherever these two European
countries planted their flags- a perfect combination of economic enterprise, worldly
power, and religious zeal.

Magellan’s voyage was financed officially by the Casa de Contraction in Seville. If the
venture succeeded, it would guarantee much needed revenue for the Spanish treasury. On
August 10, 1519, the flagship Trinidad, the Victoria, San Antonio, Concepcion, Santiago,
and 260 men under the command of Magellan slipped their berths at Seville and sailed
down the Rio Guadalquivir and into the Atlantic. Accompanying the voyage was Antonio
Pigafetta, a young and healthy Venetian nobleman eager for adventure, whose journals of
the expedition constitute the main source of what we know today about this precedent-
setting expedition.

After an epic voyage filled with extraordinary adventures, hardships, maritime disasters,
and a mutiny that nearly succeeded, the fleet, reduced to three, discovered the straits, now
bearing Magellan’s name, that lead to the Pacific Ocean-so christened by Magellan as his
expedition happened upon that great body of water, when the storm season hadn’t yet
begun. Entering the vast calm ocean, the ships tacked their way across for more than
three months without being able to reprovision-causing untold hardships and deaths-
before sighting the Marianas (present-day Guam) on March 6, 1521.

Magellan and his men named it Isla de Ladrones (Isle of Thieves), for the inhabitant’s
light-fingered proclivities, though the inhabitants, forebears of latter-day Chamorros, had
been generous with their food. (This could have simply been a case of cultural
misunderstanding: what the Europeans considered theft, the islanders thought of as
sharing.) In punishment, Magellan ordered his men to burn some of the natives’ homes,
killing seven men as a result. According to Pigafetta’s account, crew members who were
ill asked that the entrails of a dead man be brought to them, “for immediately they would
be healed”-a request that suggest pre- Christians beliefs coexisting with Christian ones on
board.
Americanization and Its Discontent

In early 1898, in response to the ongoing Cuban war of Independence against Spain, the
United States government ordered the battleship USS Maine to Havana-a move meant
signal Spain that the U.S. sympathized with the Cuban rebels and that it intended to
protect U.S. interests the Caribbean Island. The ship was blown up on February 15, 1898,
while at anchor off Havana, killing 266 men. At the time cause was unknown-though an
investigation in 1976 by Admiral Hyman Rickover of the U.S. Navy determined that the
explosion was an accident, caused by a faulty coal bunker-but U.S. newspapers
immediately blamed the Spanish.

The rallying cry for the moment was “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”
William Randolph Hearst, owner and publisher of the New York Journal, famously said
to Frederic Remington, the paper’s well-known illustrator, “You furnish the pictures and
I’ll furnish the war!” And that Hearst and the media did. The explosion was the perfect
excuse for a war, and even though Spain had offered an immediate armistice and
considerable autonomy for the Cubans, the McKinley government was undeterred from
its mission, declaring war on April 25. The conflict was just the right opportunity for a
young giant, eager to participate in the “Great Game” of empire building.

It heralded the beginning of what has since come to be known as the American Century.
Even before the formal declaration of hostilities, Theodore Roosevelt, Undersecretary of
the Navy-filling in for Secretary John D. Long, who was on leave-ordered U.S. warships
under the command of Commodore George Dewey to Hong Kong in the late February
and there await battle orders. Once at berth in Hong Kong, in anticipation of the war,
Dewey requested troop reinforcements from Washington. With the declaration of war, he
and his fleet steamed to Manila and on May 1, annihilated an aging Spanish fleet, with
only one loss of life: an American sailor felled by heat stroke. The lopsided victory
essentially sealed the fate of Spanish rule.

From Indio to Filipino: Emergence of a Nation, 1862-1898

More than any other Filipino subject to Spanish colonial rule, the medical doctor,
brilliant polymath, and writer Jose Rizal, in his incendiary 1887 novel Noli Me Tangere,
exposed the state of the archipelago as it was during the waning decades of hegemony.
The voice of the town schoolteacher lamenting his predicament to the protagonist
Crisostomo Ibarra echoed eerily the voice of the politicized Indio’s who, though acutely
aware of the need for changes in their society, felt powerless to work for these, blocked
by reactionary character of the dominant figure of the time, the friar; the narrow strictures
of education; and a civil administration indifferent at best and mindlessly cruel at worst.
(The sequel to the Noli, El Filibusterismo, or The Subversive, followed in 1891 Even
darker in its appraisal of the colonial regime, the Fili, as it was commonly referred to,
confirmed Rizal’s pariah status in the eyes of Spanish overseers.)

In the book, the rich Ibarra, recently returned from studies and travels in Europe,
personified the ilustrados, “enlightened ones,” who like Rizal and his peers were scions
of the rising haute bourgeoisie and therefore had the means to go abroad to seek either
further education, political exile, or simply a better life. For the most part, the ilustrados
chose Madrid or Barcelona, with some opting to live in Paris. The Europe of fin de siècle
nineteenth century had long been steeped in the ideas of the Enlightenment, the zeitgeist
heady with the promise of liberty and equality, with its emphasis on individual rights, the
centrality of reason, and the repudiation of oligarchy, whether in the realm of civil
government or religious authority. Perhaps the most violent (and contradictory)
manifestation of the Enlightenment’s impact on the Ancien Regime was the French
Revolution of 1789. European capitals provided the hot house intellectual atmosphere
that young, intellectually curious Filipinos lacked in Manila.

The opening up of the colony to international trade at the start of the nineteenth century
resulted in a burgeoning middle class, which in turn meant the sons of these upwardly
mobile families could be sent to colleges and universities both in manila and Europe-an
indispensable factor in the development of a national and nationalist consciousness,
Principally through the actions and writings of the ilustrados, the currents of reform
reached Las Islas Filipinas, so that the islands were inevitably affected by radical political
and social changes in Europe. Change have boarded a slow boat to Manila, but it was
coming.

Spanish society had already undergone fundamental changes by the time the ilustrados
arrived in Europe. The Southeast Asian colony was on the margins of the Spanish
empire, distant enough so that these changes did not resonate instantly or as powerfully
as might have been otherwise expected. Nevertheless, political and social alterations in
Spain were bound to have an effect on the far-way archipelago. The combination of the
Enlighten with the upheavals brought about by the French Revolution contributed to the
spread of liberal ideas in Spain. Specially, the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to 1815,
continent-wide conflicts that pitted the armies of Napoleon against varying cast of
opponents, further accelerated change and the decline of the old order.

The French invasion and occupation of Spain led to the Spanish War of Independence
(1808-1814). Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic invasion, assisted by the British
surreptitiously, brought about the temporary ascendancy of the Spanish liberals who
produced the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, which extended democratic rights not only to
Spaniards but also to all non-Spanish subjects of Madrid. Additionally, reflecting the
prevalent liberal spirit, the Cadiz Constitution set limits on the monarchy.

References:https://books.google.com.ph/books?
id=GzuEDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=philippine%20history
%20book&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiW64zh_YrzAhXJBIgKHcGIBTcQ6AF6BAg
HEAI&fbclid=IwAR1w3A9Ug1VKmVcEJ6lxTvZy1RJ57uus7s4ExHd9hUC6T_U-
7mqfT66nQ4E#v=onepage&q=philippine%20history%20book&f=false

https://www.csub.edu/pacificrim/countryprospectus/history.htm?
fbclid=IwAR2GpDifQd5vd5YYe7TqwH13D--
ABiQcwzzwF6NAy6GleG6IhIQDfHYg2PQ
.