Can any historian recommend a good book on the history of the Philippines? It'd be nice if it covered a wider time period, in lieu of "A People's History of the United States". However, I'd appreciate any book that focused on a specific time period.
This isn't exactly my area, but you might find some of these interesting:
Anderson, Warwick. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Espiritu, Augusto. Five Faces of Exile: The Nation & Filipino American Intellectuals. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Go, Julian. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning : Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Kramer, Paul. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
Rafael, Vicente. Contracting Colonialism : Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Salman, Michael. The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
These are all academic texts, and some of them are quite dense. Michael Salman's book and Julian Go's book might be a bit more accessible. Vicente Rafael's work is wonderful, though.