Shoot the messenger: so what if I'm a respected professor and an award-winning author (not to mention a grown-up)? When I talk about Texas history with seventh graders, I often feel as if I'm under siege at the Alamo. And they show me no mercy.

Publication: Texas Monthly

Publication Date: 01-JUN-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Texas Monthly, Inc.

I knew I was in trouble when the seventh graders started making me nervous. They shouldn't have: they were, after all, only mid-file school kids forced to take a year of Texas history. A handful in the back played it cool, conspicuously unimpressed by the visiting history professor and disdaining the day's special activity. But most were as innocently earnest as youth can be. Their faces shone while they shuffled their note cards, which held the questions they had been assigned to formulate. By outward appearance, they weren't anyone's idea of an intellectual hit squad. But what did I know? I had never claimed to be an expert in Texas history, and writing a book about the Texas Revolution, Lone Star Nation, simply revealed to me the extent of my ignorance. It wasn't even my idea; my New York publisher, in the flush of George W. Bush's inauguration as president and amid his soaring public-approval ratings following September 11, 200l, thought America was ready for a book about Texas. I wasn't so sure. I had never questioned the dramatic value of the events surrounding the Battle of the Alamo, and I thought if I did reasonable justice to the story, the book would sell well in Texas. But elsewhere? I had to be persuaded. An attractive advance did the trick, and I set to work. [paragraph] I began having second thoughts when a preliminary piece, titled "The Alamo Should Never Have Happened," appeared in this magazine in March 2003. I suggested that the Texas defenders squandered manpower trying to protect a post that wouldn't have done them any good had they held it and that Santa Anna lost time, troops, and moral standing by insisting on crushing the garrison there. I knew some people would be provoked, but I thought...

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