Compiled from contemporary newspaper accounts by UP professor and poet Raul Rafael Ingles, 1908: The Way It Really Was chronicles a pivotal year in Philippine history — most notably the founding of the University of the Philippines on June 18, 1908 — through day-by-day summaries of events as reported in Philippine newspapers at the time. Published as a historical journal for the UP Centennial, it captures the social, political, and cultural landscape of the Philippines under American colonial rule with the immediacy of the contemporary press.