A Line In The Sand: The Alamo in Blood and Memory - Hardcover

Roberts, Randy; Olson, James S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684835444 ISBN 13: 9780684835440

Publisher: Free Press, 2001

Synopsis

The authors of John Wayne: American tackle another American myth, using the famous de la Peħa diary and newly released Mexican documents to reconstruct a rich, lucid portrait of this seminal event in Western history. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Randy Roberts is professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author of Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes and the co-author (with James Olson) of John Wayne: American. Both books are published by The Free Press. He lives in Lafayette, Indiana.

Reviews

In John Wayne, American, the authors brilliantly explicated the American myths embodied by Wayne as much as they shed light on the man himself. This book does the same thing, but for a less directly anthropomorphic metaphor: the Battle of the Alamo. Roberts and Olson, historians at Purdue and Sam Houston State respectively, do not think the Texas Revolution of 1836 was motivated by racism and ethnocentrism, as many recent scholars do, but find it legitimately rooted in conflicting views of political freedom and individual rights. The Texans' rebellion against Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had many contemporary counterparts elsewhere in Mexico, undertaken for similar political principles, but forgotten because they failed. After addressing the details of the siege (including Davy Crockett's death), they turn to Alamo myth making, from Adina de Zavala's "near religious love for Texas and its heroes" to the familiar 1954-1955 Disney TV series that made the Alamo a national shrine. For Cold War viewers, they argue, the Alamo and Davy Crockett in particular symbolized truth, justice and sacrifice for a noble cause; Wayne's 1960 feature film The Alamo cemented the image. The authors' account of the continual conflicts over the physical and the mythical elements of the legend establishes the Alamo as a focal point of a wider struggle to define, and therefore to control, America's past. (Jan.) Forecast: John Wayne, American generated plenty of television and text punditry on the actor's place in the American mythos. While the Alamo is a less seductive subject, it remains a contentious site. This book will be well reviewed, and could certainly play a role in the closer examination of Texas that the possible (as of this writing) Bush presidency would bring.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The trouble with the past is that it keeps changing, an affliction especially true of symbols that some venerate and others denounce. "Remember the Alamo"--as all Texans do--may keep history alive, but what one remembers elides easily into one's politics. In a vibrant two-part treatment, historians Roberts and Olson present a solid summary of the Texas Revolution of 1835-36, followed by a critique of the cultural afterlife of the bloody battle at San Antonio. As the authors argue, many of the details popularly believed about the battle are historiographically suspect, yet they are crucial to the conception of William Travis and his comrades as defenders of liberty. As distilled vessels of virtue, Travis, Crockett, and the others were ready-made for the mass-marketing purposes of Walt Disney; and John Wayne's The Alamo (1960) verily proclaimed the Duke's conservative political outlook. Astute and pointed, the authors' appraisal of such uses of the battle proceeds to its contemporary life as a football in the Tejano-Anglo politics of Texas. An exceedingly well written and thought-provoking cultural history. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright İ American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684835444
• ISBN 13: 9780684835440
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368