September 13, 2025 | Cover Story PH | Liana Garcellano

The 50th-anniversary special edition of “A Past Revisited”

The current harvest of books is particularly abundant, and includes a special hardbound edition of Renato Constantino’s “A Past Revisited” as well as Atom Araullo’s “A View from the Ground,” Benjamin Pimentel’s “UG: The Life and Struggle of Edgar Jopson,” and Roderick Toledo’s “The Ruminant Ant & Other Essays.”

“A Past Revisited” was first published in 1975—a feat at the time for two reasons. First, it came three years into the martial law era and, second, in those early days when the effects of climate change had yet to be fully felt worldwide, Renato Constantino was already advocating for a rapid transition to renewable energy. He wrote: “The acceleration of efforts towards developing alternative sources of energy is another step in the right direction. The sun, the wind, the heat from the earth and the movement of water may all be harnessed…with safe methods at relatively low cost.”

Fifty years later, this special edition that acknowledges the collaboration of Constantino’s spouse, Letizia R. Constantino, presents eye-openers to Filipinos, both those grown amnesiac on Philippine history and those eager to learn about the past and find the context for the current distressing issues of corruption, historical revisionism, high unemployment, and more.

The authors Renato and Letizia Constantino. SCREENSHOT BY LIANA GARCELLANO

As Renato Constantino wrote, “history must deal with the past with a view to explaining the present.”

The book, now on its 23rd printing, was launched at Rosh Hotel in Malate, Manila, and at Museo El Deposito in San Juan City in August, and on Sept. 5 at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines (PUP) in Santa Mesa, Manila. Other launches are being planned in the cities of Bacolod, Iloilo and Tacloban.

“Our problems today require revisiting our history, [which] is intersectional and a narrative of the inarticulate,” Renato Redentor “Red” Constantino said at the launch in PUP. Red is a grandson of the authors and the managing director of the publisher, the Constantino Foundation.

Renato Redentor “Red” Constantino at the launch of “A Past Revisited” at PUP Santa Mesa. PHOTO BY LIANA GARCELLANO

Significantly, at the Q&A session, and in response to a repeated question on how the “masses” can learn quickly from the book, Red said: “Freeing one’s self is difficult if you don’t read.”

He writes in his introduction to the special edition that, except for changes to the em dashes, hyphenation, abbreviation and word spacing, the book’s content and cover design by his father, Renato “RC” Constantino Jr., remain the same.

He traces the intersectionality of fossil-fuel-driven US imperialism, historical development, and climate change, and highlights their links to America’s purchase of the Philippines and its other colonies from Spain. Case in point: Subic in Zambales, he writes, was first a coaling station of the US Navy, and the military-and-prison complex in Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay was a US military coaling depot.

“Both moves were motivated by the need to secure spaces for fossil fuels, preceding wars in the Middle East to secure petroleum resources [from] the 1970s…to the 1990s,” Red writes.

The special edition of “A Past Revisited” is available at Popular Bookstore on Tomas Morato Extension in Quezon City.