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Official History Reconsidered: The Tadhana Project in the Philippines

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Abstract

The Tadhana project was an ambitious history-writing project sponsored by Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines in the 1970s–1980s. This project was widely seen as a clear-cut expression of Marcos’s will to power. It has thus been easily dismissed as nothing but a self-serving political project. The scholars who took part in the project have long been called by various names, such as intellectual prostitutes, academic mercenaries, or Marcos’s lap dogs. This chapter examines the case of the Tadhana project to demonstrate the multidimensional, shifting, and complex power relations that underpin an official history.

This chapter is based on Chap. 2 of the author’s PhD thesis (Curaming 2006)

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Curaming, R.A. (2018). Official History Reconsidered: The Tadhana Project in the Philippines. In: Bevernage, B., Wouters, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of State-Sponsored History After 1945. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95306-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95306-6_12

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