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The Philippine Revolution. The Philippine Revolution (1896-1902) was Asia's first anti-colonial national revolution. Spanish rule over the Philippines had lasted three centuries, administered through the friar orders whose abuses - and whose blocking of reform - bred the Filipino ilustrado reform movement of Jose Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar. Rizal's novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo indicted the regime; his execution by firing squad in December 1896 turned reform into revolution.
The revolution's instrument was the Katipunan, the secret brotherhood founded by Andres Bonifacio in 1892, whose 'Cry of Pugad Lawin' (August 1896) launched the uprising. Its military genius was Emilio Aguinaldo, who drove the Spanish from Cavite, edged out Bonifacio - executed on Aguinaldo's orders in 1897, the revolution's founding fratricide - and, after a brief truce and exile, returned when the United States destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay (May 1898). On 12 June 1898 Aguinaldo proclaimed Philippine independence; the Malolos Congress wrote Asia's first republican constitution, and the First Philippine Republic was inaugurated in January 1899.
But Spain had sold the Philippines to America for $20 million at the Treaty of Paris, and the republic's fate was a new colonial war: the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) - conventional battles lost, then guerrilla resistance answered by American 'reconcentration', massacres and water cure at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Filipino lives. Aguinaldo's capture in 1901 and his oath of allegiance broke organized resistance; the last generals surrendered in 1902.
The revolution failed but founded the nation: Rizal its martyr, Bonifacio its plebeian soul, the Malolos Republic its first state. America's half-century of colonial rule ended in 1946, when the independent Republic of the Philippines finally raised the flag Aguinaldo had first unfurled in 1898.
Britannica: Philippine Revolution
Britannica: Katipunan
Britannica: History of the Philippines