Forget the Alamo
"Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos, Texans of Mexican origin who fought alongside the Anglo rebels, scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows us how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late 19th and early 20th century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness.
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What Hacker News says
- Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (Burrough, Tomlinson, Stanford)
The Cat I Never Named (Amra Sabic-El-Sayess)
- Mexico was about to end that carve out. But slavery was only one of the causes (and you're right about Santa Anna).
The myth is that Bowie and Crockett battled until their last breathes. The truth is that Bowie was sick and died in bed. Crockett gave up and was executed.
That's all from the 2021 book Forget the Alamo.
- The writer of this article in Texas Monthly, Bryan Burrough, co-authored a recent book about the Alamo: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021)
As the title indicates, the book demolishes one of the biggest myths in American history: the legend of the Alamo. The author follows the trail of hagiographic heroism from 1836, the year of the iconic battle led by William Barret Travis, a man whose own memoirs show that he was a syphilitic womanizer. Like many of the slave traders and land speculators who illegally crossed into the Mexican province of Tejas, Travis was a failed businessman, crushed by debt, who abandoned his wife and children in Alabama to play soldier of fortune on the frontier. Worse, this incompetent officer disobeyed direct orders from Sam Houston to evacuate the old Spanish mission at the Alamo, which was understood by virtually everyone to be impossible to defend against the Mexican army. The predictable result was total defeat and slaughter. After that, myth-makers began re-writing the history to turn the Alamo into a heroic tale of military glory. The mission itself was mismanaged for more than a century, large sections of the original structure were allowed to fall into disrepair, and the iconic shape of the Alamo building - the bell-shaped facade on the front wall of the chapel - was added many years after the battle of 1836. Today the battle over the Alamo continues in the form of struggles by the community to recover the authentic history of the place, while hard-line conservatives insist on maintaining the fiction of the fake past.
https://www.amazon.com/Forget-Alamo-Rise-Fall-American/dp/19...*
