Walter Buenger is the Texas State Historical Association’s chief historian. The TSHA is not a state agency, it is a nonprofit, but it plays a key role in history education in Texas schools, and of being an authoritative repository of the state’s history through its online Handbook of Texas.
Buenger has recently made some assertions about the Alamo and it’s historical significance that bear some closer scrutiny. He claimed in a recent paper that the battle was “tactically insignificant” and that the historical importance is over blown. He also says the memory of the event and that of Goliad are steeped in “whiteness”and that it wasn’t recognized as important until decades after the battle, and then only as a “backlash to African Americans gaining more political power.”
Most of you know this editor is a history type guy, with actual degrees and study to back it up. I have only one response to this dimwits assertions. Quoting the memorable Colonel Potter: Horse hockey.
I don’t have the time today to do a proper fisking of “professor” Buenger’s paper today. Fortunately one has already been done by Bryan Preston over at PJMedia. He does an excellent job at showing where Buenger’s thesis fails when it runs into the historical record. I highly recommend reading it if you’re even remotely interested.
It’s painful to me as a historian to see objective truth run through the processes of social justice, critical race theory and revisionism. In this case, it wasn’t just Anglos rebelling against Santa Anna, there was a very large contingent of Tejanos fighting against the dictator. In fact, one of the Tejano survivors of that massacre was Mayor of San Antonio for several years after Texas won it’s independence from Mexico.