“Why would we spend so much time talking about a loss? People go, ‘I’m a Texan.’ And, you know, me and my cousins got into a lot of arguments over this. Even with Civil War battlefields, at least someone in the United States won. I’m proud of my Mexican family. The battle has been immortalized in several TV series and films, including 1960’s The Alamo, starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett. “Well, I don’t know what side you’re putting me on, but go ahead,” answered Menéndez. “This is what I love about Texas. This isn’t “kids today.” No one is getting off anyone’s lawn here. When al Qaeda terrorists attacked the United States, remembering the Alamo became inevitably intertwined with never forgetting 9/11. White’s tweet was more like John Blutarsky’s exhortations to fraternity brothers. Clearly, the old white fella thought the brown-skinned Texas state senator who represented the Alamo was basically a Mexican. Travis replied by openi… Texas’ Ted Poe probably remembered the Alamo more than anyone in Congress and seemed to love nothing more than to link the Alamo to the war on terrorism. Perhaps the oddest bit of revisionism was when Missouri’s Todd Akin wrote a twisted vision of the Battle of the Alamo for the digital age: Mr. Speaker, we rise today to discuss this resolution that is in two parts before us. It makes total sense.”. Exactly half as many think the Republic of Texas won the battle, which has been compared to some of history’s most famous defeats: Thermopylae, Pearl Harbor, and 9/11. In the February 2020 UT/Texas Tribune poll, Henson asked Texans, in effect, if they were smarter than a seventh-grader: “Whose armed forces won the Battle of the Alamo in 1836?”. Usually, a Q&A goes sideways when someone asks a question in the form of a statement, and that’s what happened when an older white man who looked like a shambolic Jimmy Buffet impersonator took his turn at the back microphone. Running low on supplies, having troubles coordinating his land and naval forces, losing a large percentage of his Highlander regiment in a battle at Fort Mosé, and threatened by a relief force coming up from Cuba, Oglethorpe retreated to Georgia, but only temporarily. White soon deleted his tweet, making orphans of the replies that contained jokes of varying wit. Even if Mexico won at the Alamo, they lost because of the attention paid to the Texans.”, Like most kids in San Antonio, Denise Hernandez went to a public school where working-class Hispanic kids were the majority. I’m not proud of everything that has occurred. Richard Slotkin, a professor at Wesleyan University, has a theory. Only as a myth of regenerative violence does that have any logic. From Anglo and Hispanic students alike, she would always hear, “We won.”. Over the previous 19 years, Cronkite had established himself not only as the nation's leading newsman but as "the most trusted man ...read more, Helmut Kohl, the interim chancellor of West Germany since the fall of Helmut Schmidt’s Social Democrat government in 1982, is elected German chancellor as his Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party is voted back into power. In early October 1835, Texas settlers gathered in Gonzales to stop Mexican troops from reclaiming a small cannon. OPEN & UNLEASH THE LONE STAR STATE!!!”. “In the schools, basically the way we grew up is that the Alamo, what we learned from that as Mexican Americans is that Texas won and Mexico lost. Very logical reasons,” said Cure. You are now signed up to receive The Curve, sent each weekday evening. Every year, he always put on his final exam who won the Battle of the Alamo. The Siege of Béxar (aka Assault on San Antonio, Battle of San Antonio, Battle of Bexar, Storming of San Antonio de Bexar, Taking of Bexar) was the first major military action in the Texas revolution for independence. From October until early December 1835 an army of Texan volunteers laid siege to a Mexican army in San Antonio de Béxar. Who are you referring to?” he asked. The next battle was on an island in a bayou next to the San Jacinto River about halfway between San Antonio and the Louisiana border. “No, this is true, but, but I’m gonna, I… I, you know, I…,” the senator began in the way of practiced public speakers do of throwing out a lot of rhetorical flares to buy himself some time. March 6 marks the 183rd anniversary to the end of the 13-day siege that followed the Battle of the Alamo in … One reply, though, stood out. Texas aged 18-29 are the least likely to know Mexico won the Battle of the Alamo (43 percent), and the most likely to think Texas won (31 percent), that the United States won 10 percent), and to say they don’t know at 17 percent, which I suppose is a way of answering the question correctly. Texas was victorious this time, and won independence from Mexico, bringing the Texas Revolution to an end. Map of the line of attack by Texans against the Mexican forces occupying Bexar, showing the layout of San Antonio de Bexar, including roads, major buildings, rivers, and creeks. On this day in 1835, Mexican General Martin Perfecto de Cos raises a flag of truce. “I’m interested to know why you said we didn’t lose. So we are saying, oh, we want support, but we don’t want to support you. It’s like, look, you’re an American of Hispanic descent, and I’m proud of my descent. As he puts it, “Violence is an essential and necessary part of the process through which American society was established and through which its democratic values are defended and enforced.” In Slotkin’s telling, the violence is a feature, not a bug. Malenkov’s tenure was extremely brief, and within a matter of weeks he was pushed aside by Nikita Khrushchev. Mexican troops breached the north wall and flooded into the compound, awakening many of the Texans inside. During the following week, the German SS executed 263 Dutch in retaliation. It’s child’s play, literally, since state law mandates that every seventh-grader in Texas remember the Alamo. I’m going to ask you now to shut down that part of your brain that is blaming youth for ignorance. The typical Texan mind is that Mexico lost the Alamo,” she said. But it wasn’t for his absurdist belief that a show of economic defiance would lead a global revolt against an airborne virus. The distances to various locations are given. And I tell my children the same thing. The final attack came before dawn on March 6. What I am saying is that the Battle of the Alamo exists as more than a historical event. The panel went off the rails during the Q&A. The volunteer soldiers defending the Alamo included doctors and farmers, as well as Tennessee frontiersman and Congressman Davy Crockett, who fought in the Tennessee militia. This piece originally ran in Jason Stanford’s newsletter, The Experiment. How do you say you support and then say, but we don’t want to send them any reinforcing troops? (In fact, he did not mention the Alamo in public as president.). Despite being clearly outnumbered, Alamo co-commanders James Bowie and William Travis insisted on remaining in place. You can’t draw a crowd in Austin to listen to a couple politicians agree with each other – and Menéndez and Bush certainly did that. “They did lose the war, but they didn’t win that battle,” said the man at the back mic. The Dutch Resistance was one of the fiercest of all the ...read more. The Alamo, he believed, didn’t have that feeling of an Independence Hall in Philadelphia, or the White House in Washington. The final engagement during the battle involved half of the American garrison, and a landing party from a reinforcing warship, which successfully lifted the siege. This time the crowd did not laugh. 3 min read. Whoops! He was a Texan in Mexico but a Mexican in Texas. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?”. “The Mexicans won the battle of the Alamo,” said the man, and the crowd laughed. After the departure of General Austin, the besieging army before San Antonio came very near being broken up. There was an error, and we couldn't process your sign-up. “Thinking back, I would say he was racist,” she said. When Cynthia Orozco taught Texas history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, one of the first questions she would put to her students is who won the Alamo. The ...read more, A British ferry leaving Zeebrugge, Belgium, capsizes, drowning 188 people, on March 6, 1987. Getting this question wrong was consistent across our usual dividing lines, including sex, education, partisanship, and ideology. “My question is related, but first I want to set the historical record correct. He was ready to surrender San Antonio to the Texian Army. Thirteen days earlier, on February 23, Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ordered a siege of the Alamo Mission (near present-day San Antonio), which had been occupied by rebel Texas forces since December. End of the Battle. 4 Texans wounded and 17 Mexican casualties. My parents were immigrants. They’d come for one of the great oddities in Texas history, Phil Collins, who amassed reputedly the largest collection of Alamo memorabilia in the world and then donated it to the state of Texas. The walls enclosing the gardens behind the Alamo today, as well as the gift shop and other structures around the complex, were added a century or more after the battle. The capture concluded the long Siege of Béxar. the Alamo could NOT BE DEFENDED. Menéndez shrugged, put his right hand on his chest – over his heart, if you will – and said, “I’m an American.” Again, the crowd laughed, and not because anyone was trying to be funny. Toward the end of the year, the capital, San Antonio… The younger you are, the wronger you are, at least when it comes to the Alamo. Getting his facts exactly straight about Texas’ creation myth doesn’t essentially matter to White as much as the truthiness of his all-caps appeal to the governor to unleash the Texas economy to defeat COVID-19 with the full force of our commerce. The Alamo has become a story of good guys and bad guys that brings up all sorts of identity issues in a state as ethnically diverse as Texas. The siege of Bexar (San Antonio) became the first major campaign of the Texas Revolution. Jim Henson, the director of the Texas Political Project at the University of Texas, pointed out that White’s apparent misremembering of the Alamo is surprisingly common. It lasted from February 26 to March 6, 1836. “I remember hating that class because it was boring and he didn’t make it relevant to us.”, Hernandez, now a Chicana activist, does have fond memories of the school trip to the Alamo and the IMAX, where the Alamo movie has been a field-trip staple for area kids since the late ‘80s. This is why these myths – less the events themselves than the justification for further violence provided by martyrdom – have been used by presidents since Theodore Roosevelt to explain U.S. foreign policy. They applauded, and this time they meant it. On March 6, 1836, after 13 days of intermittent fighting, the Battle of the Alamo comes to a gruesome end, capping off a pivotal moment in the Texas Revolution. SAN ANTONIO — Remember the Alamo! Instead, the Texas Twitterati ridiculed White for apparently not remembering that the Mexicans defeated the Texians at the Alamo. Click on image for larger image and transcript. Definition of the Alamo Definition: The Battle of the Alamo was a 13 day siege at a mission in San Antonio that was fought between February 23, 1836 – March 6, 1836 by Mexican forces of about 4000, under President General Santa Anna, against a handful of 180 American rebels fighting for Texan independence from Mexico. Stephen Harrigan, an acknowledged and respected Alamo-head by dint of his best-selling 2000 novel Gates of the Alamo, moderated a panel that featured state senator Jose Menéndez, whose district includes the Alamo, and George P. 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