Forget the Alamo...and Dan Patrick too
Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021), by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford, is written like a brisk intervention: the authors argue that Texans (and plenty of non-Texans) have been taught to “remember the Alamo” in a way that’s less a history lesson and more civic religion. Their core claim is not that nothing heroic happened in San Antonio in 1836, but that the story most people inherit—noble martyrs standing for liberty, the battle as an uncomplicated origin myth for Texas—was selectively constructed, repeatedly polished, and then weaponized for political and cultural purposes.
The book is structured around two overlapping projects. First, it retells the Texas Revolution and the Alamo campaign with a heavy emphasis on context: land hunger, factional politics, and the ways slavery and racial hierarchy shaped who wanted independence and why. Second, it tracks how the Alamo story was later packaged—through textbooks, politicians, boosterism, and pop culture—into a symbolic narrative that could stand in for “Texas values” and a particular idea of whiteness and Anglo dominance. The authors’ basic message is: if you want to understand why the Alamo still sets off cultural alarms today, you have to look at both the 1830s and the decades of mythmaking afterward.
What the book says happened (and why it mattered)
In the authors’ telling, the road to the Alamo starts with a messy reality: Mexican Texas was a frontier region that Mexico tried to stabilize by encouraging immigration, including from the United States. Over time, many Anglo settlers brought enslaved people and built an economy that depended on slavery even as Mexico moved toward abolition and tighter central control. That tension—between Mexican policies and settler interests—sits near the center of the book’s explanation for why rebellion gained momentum. In other words, the fight is not portrayed as a pure liberty-versus-tyranny tale; it’s portrayed as a power struggle in which slavery was not incidental.
When the narrative reaches the Alamo itself, the authors emphasize how contingent and politically fraught the stand actually was. They stress disagreements among the Texian leadership, the improvised nature of the garrison, and the fact that the Alamo’s defenders were not operating under a single, coherent democratic philosophy. In the popular myth, the defenders are unified patriots; in the book, they’re a coalition of people with mixed motives, operating amid confusion, ego, and urgency.
Another theme is the Tejano story—Mexican Texans who were part of Texas’s political life and who participated in the broader revolutionary era but were often written out of the heroic narrative that later crystallized around the Alamo. The book argues that subsequent retellings leaned hard into an Anglo-centered legend and treated Mexicans largely as villains or faceless troops, which helped create a lasting cultural script: Texas as “Anglo courage under siege,” Mexico as “other,” and Tejanos as a footnote.
In short, the authors don’t deny that the siege was dramatic or that people died bravely. They argue that the meaning assigned to that sacrifice—what it supposedly proves about Texas—was built later, and built for reasons that often had more to do with power and identity than historical accuracy.
How the myth got built (and why it stuck)
A big part of the book’s energy is spent on mythmaking: how a complicated, morally ambiguous episode becomes a clean parable. The authors describe a long process where the Alamo’s story is simplified, moralized, and repurposed—especially in eras when Texas (and the broader U.S.) were sorting out race, hierarchy, and belonging. In this version of events, the Alamo myth is useful precisely because it’s flexible: it can mean courage, sacrifice, freedom, whiteness, anti-Mexican sentiment, anti-federal resentment, or just a general “don’t mess with Texas” vibe, depending on who’s doing the invoking.
They also make a point that should be familiar to anyone who’s watched modern politics: once a narrative becomes identity, factual corrections feel like attacks. The myth isn’t only a story about 1836—it becomes a shorthand for who counts as a “real Texan,” what values are considered legitimate, and which histories are allowed on the main stage.
The Dan Patrick controversy: a book becomes a culture-war event
That tension moved from theory to headline in summer 2021, when a virtual event connected to the Bullock Texas State History Museum (planned with the Writers’ League of Texas) involving the authors was abruptly canceled shortly before it was scheduled to begin. Reporting at the time described the cancellation as tied to backlash over the book’s framing—especially its discussion of slavery’s role in the lead-up to the revolution.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, one of the most powerful officials in Texas state government, publicly took an aggressive stance against the book and the idea of giving it a platform at a state history institution. Commentary and reporting around the cancellation circulated Patrick’s characterization of the book as “fact-free” rewriting of Texas history and framed his intervention as political pressure on a publicly affiliated venue.
The episode became a near-perfect demonstration of the book’s argument about myth and identity: the authors publish a revisionist critique of a cherished legend, and the response isn’t just scholarly disagreement—it’s institutional conflict over who gets to speak, under what banner, and whether challenging the traditional story is treated as education or as heresy. It also broadened the controversy beyond the book itself and into a bigger fight about “patriotic history,” public museums, and what kinds of historical interpretation are acceptable in state-branded spaces.
Soon after, Patrick also pushed for the authors to appear alongside other historians in a debate-style panel “to get to the truth,” effectively repositioning a book talk as an adjudication of loyalty and legitimacy. Whether you read that as a good-faith call for scholarly balance or as a political counter-programming move, it underscores the same dynamic: the Alamo story is treated less like a historical subject and more like protected civic property.
The “irony” angle: defending Texas, and who gets to claim it
Dan Patrick's claims and posturing are as amusing as insulting to any native Texan given that Lt. Governor Dan Patrick was born Dannie Scott Goeb in Baltimore, Maryland—which is about as Texan as if he had moved here from Canada. This is even more preposterous considering the well-established fact that two of three authors were born in Texas, and the third author has been in Texas long enough that he may as well have been. Patrick's position on the Alamo is about as Texas as Ozzy Osborne urinating on the Centotaph. But at least Ozzy could claim he was drunk.
Alas, native Texans can laugh at our regrettable Lt. Governor and take away a good bit of actual history from this book at the same time. Taken as prose history, Forget the Alamo is designed to be accessible and a bit provocative—less a neutral encyclopedia entry and more a forceful re-frame. The authors want readers to see the Alamo not as a sacred shrine to uncomplicated heroism, but as an event embedded in slavery, settler colonial ambitions, and ethnic hierarchy, later converted into a cultural emblem that could be deployed to define “real Texas” and marginalize competing stories.
And taken as a public episode, the Dan Patrick backlash functioned as an accidental “extra chapter”: it illustrated how quickly historical debate can become institutional control, and how the Alamo’s meaning—who owns it, who can critique it, and what counts as disrespect—still has the power to trigger modern political action.