NICK ELEMIA
The encompassing “Identification, Classification, and Recognition of Historic Sites and Structures” by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) underscores that select places or edifices can be marked “historical” only after the acid tests of field evaluation, scholarly research, and reliable local interviews plus supporting documents. This is encouraging enough. But in cases when local history is at the mercy of very scarce chronographic journalism, the opinion is to redirect the writing to more practical matters.