Other FilNet editorial interventions are executive summaries, additional chapter or subheads to break up lengthy passages, embedded hyperlinks defining or expanding the knowledge of relevant keywords, and additional endnotes for further elucidation, along with an easy-to-use citation feature (Cite Me!), pre-formatted to either Modern Language Association (MLA) or University of Chicago style.

The publication history of the monumental B&R, as Filipinos call the work, is deeply related to the country’s American colonization. When Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet led by Admiral Patricio Montojo at the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, Americans were ecstatic at the acquisition of new territory in the Far East. But little was known in the English-speaking world about the former Spanish colony.  Because of this, American President William McKinley instructed researchers and academicians to publish books and documents about the Philippines.

Heeding this call, the publisher Arthur H. Clark of Cleveland, Ohio, commissioned two American Hispanists, Emma Helen Blair and James Alexander Robertson, to travel around the world to collect, translate, and annotate Filipiniana manuscripts and documents. From 1902 to 1907, the duo traveled around the world visiting government archives, libraries, and collections in Mexico, Spain, Italy, France, England and the United States to gather, translate, and annotate manuscripts and documents covering the entire history of the Philippines from the court report of Chinese traveler Chua-Ju-Kua in 1493 to the surrender of Spain in 1898.

The editors, claiming scholarly detachment, wrote in the Preface that “the Editors assume an entirely impartial attitude, free from any personal bias, whether political or sectarian. They aim to secure historical accuracy… and to depict faithfully the various aspects of the life of the Filipinos, their relations with other peoples (especially those of Europe), and the gradual ascent of many tribes from barbarism.” What is striking to the present reader is the absence of any Filipinos in the editorial panel of the collection, as well as the Social Darwinist thread that is sophisticatedly woven in the stringing of chronicles.

 

With its publication in 1909, the 55-volume The Philippine Islands 1493-1898 quickly became the standard and customary source of primary historical information on the Philippines. Whatever its faults Philippine scholars have continued to cite it as primary sources for the last 10 decades, ignoring the fact that they are only citing what may be skewed translations from Spanish into English and that many of the original primary documents can easily be read online at the Archivo General de Indias and Filipiniana.net. Since the B&R collection consisted of translated missionary letters, official reports, chronicles, royal decrees, ecclesiastical documents, and travel accounts, it has remained as one of the most authoritative sources in writing a “history from above” perspective, especially for those Philippine historians who are lazy to read the original Spanish.

Being one of the major references for those studying Spanish-era Philippines, Blair and Robertson has been fair game and been heavily criticized by a generations of new scholars and historians. Gregorio Zaide lamented the over reliance of editors’ Blair and Robertson on documents found in Sevilla’s Archivo General de Indias. Others like Domingo Abella in his 1962 preface to the B&R reprint pointed out that the editors omitted the Propaganda Movement, José Rizal, the Katipunan, Philippine Revolution, and pre-Hispanic Philippines from its accounts, the very topics and events significant to the uniting of an “autonomous” and nationalist history of the Filipinos. Other scholars advocating the “history from below” perspective have also labeled it as a perpetuation of the “history from above” or history from the viewpoint of the victors, conquerors, and colonizers. Since the documents and manuscripts of Blair and Robertson are pre-selected and are a mere translation of the originals, it offers a narrow and limited scope of the entire Philippine history during the Spanish period. Translation and language errors are also present in Blair and Robertson if the original document and the translated text are studied side by side.

B&R was reprinted twice, once in 1962 by Domingo Abella and another in 1974 by Cacho Hermanos, Inc. In 2000, a CD-ROM version of Blair and Robertson was released by the Bank of the Philippines Islands to commemorate its 150th anniversary. The digital version of the Blair and Robertson is also available at University of Michigan website (all 55 volumes) and Project Gutenberg (up to volume 27).

 To balance the presentation of Virtual Blair and Robertson, Filipiniana.net has mounted a parallel and similar project that will be launched under the name Archivo General de Filipinas Virtual. If Virtual Blair and Robertson contain translated documents and manuscripts, Archivo General de Filipinas Virtual will publish the original untranslated documents and manuscripts scattered in the various national archives and libraries in Philippines, Spain and Mexico. Aside from uploading the original document and manuscript in their original language, Filipiniana.net will provide executive summaries in both Spanish and English.

Aside from publishing selections from the world’s greatest Spanish-language archives, Filipiniana.net will also be publishing similar collections that have been undertaken by great Filipinists yet neglected by the many generations of Philippine scholars: Wenceslao E. Retana's 5-volume Archivo del Bibliófilo Filipino, a more balanced representation of propaganda and revolutionary Philippines, and Pedro Torres Lanzas’ and Pablo Pastell's 10-volume Colección General de Documentos relativos a las Islas Filipinas en el Archivo General de Indias, containing annotations of 20,892 documents spanning the period from 1493 to 1662 and which was published by the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas or Tabacalera. On the latter's initial publication in 1919 of the first volume, James Robertson wrote in the Hispanic American Historical Review: "If this plan is carried out in its entirety, it will be the first time that all the documents of the archives relating to a given regional unit of considerable size have been published. The time that will be consumed in exhausting the documents of the archives relating to the Philippines may be estimated somewhat by referring to the Blair and Robertson collection, the majority of the original documents of which came from Seville, and yet that series touched but a very small part of the material available. To complete the present series, even with a generous appearance of volumes each year... probably more a generation will be required. The material of the first volume and its mechanical get-up are inspiring and the best wishes of those interested in the Philippine field go with the Tabacalera company in its daring venture."

With the Archivo General de Filipinas Virtual and Virtual Blair and Robertson, the Tabacalera challenge will now be fulfilled. Philippine scholars will now have for the first time two parallel primary accounts in writing and reexamining Philippine history. With the publication of these two monumental micro websites, scholars and researchers can now redefine, reexamine, and write a balanced and more informed Philippine history.