The history, society, and culture of the Philippines between 1865 and 1965 were reflected in the country's newspapers and magazines. They reproduced politicians' speeches, published novels, short stories, and poems, reported the latest events, and commemorated anniversaries. Thanks to advances in digitization, we now have online access to many of these interesting but previously dispersed and sometimes difficult-to-access materials.
This exhibit is one of the results of a project funded by the Flemish Agency for Academic Cooperation (VLIRUOS). As a part of this project, a group of researchers from the University of Antwerp, the University of the Philippines and the Universidad de Alcalá has been able to create a repository of historical Philippine newspapers that can be consulted at this link. However, these are not always easy to read or interpret, as they often refer to characters now forgotten; or sometimes, editorials take into account events that were essential at the time but that may not be kept in mind when reading them nowadays. And there are also ideological biases of the newspapers themselves that may not be so obvious today, but must certainly be taken into account to understand even the headlines. For this reason, we have created this exhibition, which identifies some interesting and recurring themes in Philippine periodicals, and gathers articles, cartoons, literary works, advertisements, and photographs into narratives that tell some stories of this country.