Aguinaldo’s real sentiment about Revolt of the Masses

THERE are some historians who view the 1956 work of Teodoro Agoncillo, Revolt of the Masses, as already outdated. First, aside from using the problematic term “masses” to define the Filipinos in the late 19th century, it was a revolution that was joined also by the elite. Second, there is much new information and many insights about Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan that have come out since from the research of historians and writers such as Diosdado Capino, E. Arsenio Manuel, Zeus Salazar, Milagros Guerrero, Ramon Villegas and Emmanuel Encarnacion, among many others. There is also the publication of Jim Richardson’s The Light of Liberty, which features documents confiscated from the Katipunan from 1892-1897, now housed in the Archivo General Militar de Madrid. I’ve also noted why the all-important memoir of Gen. Santiago Alvarez in the prewar newspapers were not part of Agoncillo’s sources in Revolt.

But in all fairness, the next generation of historians had the luxury to go deeper and focus on emphasizing more specific research because Agoncillo in Revolt already laid the groundwork for the basics. Historians build on previous knowledge so we should never cancel the classics. Its second edition, with additional foreword by his son and a preface that Agoncillo wrote in 1976, was recently published by the University of the Philippines Press in 2017.