The award-winning historian provides a provocative new analysis of the Battle of the Alamo—including new information on the fate of Davy Crockett. Contrary to legend, we now know that the defenders of the Alamo during the Texan Revolution died in a merciless predawn attack by Mexican soldiers. With extensive research into recently discovered Mexican accounts, as well as forensic evidence, historian Phillip Tucker sheds new light on the famous battle, contending that the traditional myth is even more off-base than we thought. In a startling revelation, Tucker uncovers that the primary fights took place on the plain outside the fort. While a number of the Alamo’s defenders hung on inside, most died while attempting to escape. Capt. Dickinson, with cannon atop the chapel, fired repeatedly into the throng of enemy cavalry until he was finally cut down. The controversy surrounding Davy Crockett still remains, though the recently authenticated diary of the Mexican Col. José Enrique de la Peña offers evidence that he surrendered. Notoriously, Mexican Pres. Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna burned the bodies of the Texans who had dared stand against him. As this book proves in thorough detail, the funeral pyres were well outside the fort—that is, where the two separate groups of escapees fell on the plain, rather than in the Alamo itself.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The traditional view of the Alamo defenders is that they were the highest minded of freedom fighters who died in defense of liberty, republican government, and democratic principles. However, many of the men who fought for Texas liberty were slave-owners. #2 The Mexican government, unlike the American government, was opposed to slavery. The first Americans to settle west of Missouri in a vast land ruled by other powers, the Anglo-Celts who migrated to Texas brought no such enlightened thought with them. #3 Slavery was a main economic factor in the development of Texas, and it was defended because few colonists doubted the truth that without it, the state would be destroyed. #4 The Alamo was a symbol of the American Dream, but it was also a symbol of how easily race mixing could result in a unified people. The fear of an abolitionist Mexico played on the historic Southern-based paranoia of the Texas colonists.

In this ground-breaking book, Phillip Thomas Tucker, Ph.D., has presented an entirely ""new look"" at the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836 without the traditional romance and myths. Mexico made the mistake of allowing American immigrants to settle in Texas. Mostly from the South, they created an unprecedented economic prosperity based on slavery and cotton cultivation. However, these developments set the stage for open warfare between the largely pro-slavery settlers and the Republic of Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829. Because of the massive support from the U.S. to the Texas rebels who fought to preserve the Southern way of life and slavery, the Texas Revolution was actually America's first war for slavery. With this revealing new perspective, Tucker's outstanding historical analysis has given us an insightful understanding of a war that altered the destinies of two neighboring republics. For the first time, Tucker has revealed the hidden secrets and forgotten truths about the Texas Revolution.

In Volume II of this ground-breaking series, Phillip Thomas Tucker, Ph.D., has presented a new look at the Texas Revolution of 1835-1836 without the traditional romance and myths. Mexico made the mistake of allowing American immigrants to settle in Texas. Mostly from the South, they created an unprecedented economic prosperity based on slavery and cotton cultivation. However, these developments set the stage for open warfare between the largely pro-slavery settlers and the Republic of Mexico, which had abolished slavery in 1829. Because of the massive support from the U.S. to the Texas rebels who fought to preserve the Southern way of life and slavery, the Texas Revolution was actually America's first war for slavery. With this revealing new perspective, Tucker's historical analysis has given us an insightful understanding of a war that altered the destinies of two neighboring republics. For the first time, Tucker has revealed the hidden secrets and forgotten truths of the Texas Revolution.

Across black America during the Golden Age of Aviation, John C. Robinson was widely acclaimed as the long-awaited “black Lindbergh.” Robinson’s fame, which rivaled that of Joe Louis and Jesse Owens, came primarily from his wartime role as the commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Force after Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935. As the only African American who served during the war’s entirety, the Mississippi-born Robinson garnered widespread recognition, sparking an interest in aviation for young black men and women. Known as the “Brown Condor of Ethiopia,” he provided a symbolic moral example to an entire generation of African Americans. While white America remained isolationist, Robinson fought on his own initiative against the march of fascism to protect Africa’s only independent black nation. Robinson’s wartime role in Ethiopia made him America’s foremost black aviator. Robinson made other important contributions that predated the Italo-Ethiopian War. After graduating from Tuskegee Institute, Robinson led the way in breaking racial barriers in Chicago, becoming the first black student and teacher at one of the most prestigious aeronautical schools in the United States, the Curtiss-Wright Aeronautical School. In May 1934, Robinson first planted the seed for the establishment of an aviation school at Tuskegee Institute. While Robinson’s involvement with Tuskegee was only a small part of his overall contribution to opening the door for blacks in aviation, the success of the Tuskegee Airmen—the first African American military aviators in the U.S. armed forces—is one of the most recognized achievements in twentieth-century African American history.

Civil War historians shed new light on the importance of guerrilla combat across the south in this “useful and fascinating work” (Choice). Touching states from Virginia to New Mexico, guerrilla warfare played a significant yet underexamined role in the Civil War. Guerrilla fighters fought for both the Union and the Confederacy—as well as their own ethnic groups, tribes, or families. They were deadly forces that plundered, tortured, and terrorized those in their path, and their impact is not yet fully understood. This richly diverse volume assembles a team of both rising and eminent scholars to examine guerrilla warfare in the South during the Civil War. Together, they discuss irregular combat as practiced by various communities in multiple contexts, including how it was used by Native Americans, the factors that motivated raiders in the border states, and the women who participated as messengers, informants, collaborators, and combatants. They also explore how the Civil War guerrilla has been mythologized in history, literature, and folklore.

Discover the little-known role Alexander Hamilton played in the decisive battle of the American Revolution: Yorktown. Alexander Hamilton and the Battle of Yorktown, October 1781 is the first book in nearly two and a half centuries that has ever been devoted to the story of Alexander Hamilton’s key contributions in winning the most decisive victory the of the American Revolutionary war at Yorktown. Past biographies of Hamilton, including the most respected ones, have minimized the overall importance of the young lieutenant colonel’s role and battlefield performance at Yorktown, which was key to forcing the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s army. Hamilton led the assault on strategic Redoubt Number Ten, located on the left flank of the British defensive line, and captured the defensive bastion—an accomplishment that ensured the defeat and surrender of Cornwallis’s army that won the American Revolution and changed the course of world history. You thought you knew the full story of the founding father of the American financial system from Lin Manual Miranda's Broadway smash hit Hamilton, but Alexander Hamilton and the Battle of Yorktown, October 1781 brings into sharp relief the vital role he played in the most important battle of the American Revolution, as told by renowned historian Phillip Thomas Ticker, PhD.

There is the story the Lone Star State likes to tell about itself—and then there is the reality, a Texas past that bears little resemblance to the manly Anglo myth of Texas exceptionalism that maintains a firm grip on the state’s historical imagination. Lone Star Mind takes aim at this traditional narrative, holding both academic and lay historians accountable for the ways in which they craft the state’s story. A clear-sighted, far-reaching work of intellectual history, this book marshals a wide array of pertinent scholarship, analysis, and original ideas to point the way toward a new “usable past” that twenty-first-century Texans will find relevant. Ty Cashion fixes T. R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans in his crosshairs in particular, laying bare the conceptual deficiencies of the romantic and mythic narrative the book has served to codify since its first publication in 1968. At the same time, Cashion explores the reasons why the collective efforts of university-trained scholars have failed to diminish the appeal of the state’s iconic popular culture, despite the fuller and more accurate record these historians have produced. Framing the search for a collective Texan identity in the context of a post-Christian age and the end of Anglo-male hegemony, Lone Star Mind illuminates the many historiographical issues besetting the study of American history that will resonate with scholars in other fields as well. Cashion proposes that a cultural history approach focusing on the self-interests of all Texans is capable of telling a more complete story—a story that captures present-day realities.

The history that the textbooks left out. For far too long, American history has been left in the unreliable hands of those that author Donald Jeffries refers to as the court historians. Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 fights back by scrutinizing the accepted history of everything from the American War of Independence to the establishment reputation of Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination, both World Wars, US government experimentation on prisoners, mental patients, innocent children and whole populated areas, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and much, much more. Secular saints like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin D. Roosevelt are examined in a critical way they seldom have been. Jeffries spares no one and nothing in this explosive new book. The atrocities of Union troops during the Civil War, and Allied troops during World War II, are documented in great detail. The Nuremberg Trials are presented as the antithesis of justice. In the follow-up to his previous, bestselling book Hidden History: An Expose of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics, Jeffries demonstrates that crimes, corruption, and conspiracies didn't start with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. History should be much more than cardboard villains and impossibly unrealistic heroes. Thanks to the efforts of the court historians, most Americans are historically illiterate. Crimes and Cover-ups in American Politics: 1776-1963 is a bold attempt at setting the record straight.

A New York Times bestseller! “Lively and absorbing. . ." — The New York Times Book Review "Engrossing." —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.