The Alamo
The most famous site in Texas history, the Alamo has been interpreted and reinterpreted by every generation of Texans. The former mission in downtown San Antonio confounds visitors who expect a grand building to match the Alamo's towering mythology. Instead they are confronted with "a squat and oddly configured structure that is in almost every way inscrutable," wrote writer-at-large Stephen Harrigan, the author of the celebrated novel The Gates of the Alamo.
In 1975 he wrote about the cheesiness and low-rent Disneyfication of the plaza surrounding our most venerated site and the “reverent shuffle of feet and the whispers of fathers misinforming their children” inside the Alamo chapel itself. Missing from the Alamo experience, Harrigan realized, was any effort to explain what actually happened there and why; apparently it was felt that most people had already seen the movie. He returned in 2000 to find much—though not all—of the nonsense swept away and an admirable effort underway to impart some sense of historical perspective on the events of 1836.
In 2010 Jan Jarboe Russell wrote about the politics of preserving the Alamo—not only the fort itself, but the myth surrounding it—a job long held by the venerable Daughters of the Republic of Texas.
But the one man who knows more about Alamo arcana than almost anybody else is Phil Collins—yes, that Phil Collins—as John Spong revealed in a 2012 story that featured one of the all-time great Texas Monthly story titles: "Come and Take a Look at Me Now." Read it again. Then read the story, because it just gets better from there.
After 164 years, what more is there to say about (or see at) the old mission church in downtown San Antonio? That depends on how you look at it.
Against all odds, Phil Collins has turned himself into a world-class Alamo buff who will happily talk your ear off about Santa Anna and Davy Crockett. Can you feel it coming in the Bexar tonight?
You remember, don’t you? That's the place John Wayne died.
An exclusive excerpt from Stephen Harrigan's eagerly awaited novel.
The genteel matriarchs of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas are at war—with each other. And this time it's a no-quarter struggle for the group's heart and soul.
He was no William Barrett Travis, but in many ways, the leader of the Brand Davidians was an archetypal Texan to the end.
Sorry, T. R. Fehrenbach: the new Texas historians don’t care about Davy Crockett or other old icons. To them, the real heroes are women, blacks, and yes, Mexican Americans.
The very spot where William Barrett Travis wrote his famous “victory or death” letter is a Ripley’s Haunted Adventures. And other ways gross commercialization has desecrated the Alamo’s sacred battleground site.
With March 6 fast approaching, let's doff our coonskin caps to the Serious Alamo Guys, a band of mostly Anglo, mostly bearded, mostly fifty-plus historians who are Bowie-knife sharp on the subject of the mythic battle.
Yes, we should remember the battle at the center of the Texas Revolution. But we should forget everything we think we know about it.