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...*
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...*