The Alamo: Surrounded and Outnumbered, They Chose to Make a Defiant Last Stand

I learned a lot from this book. I am sure my students will too.

I think that "A Day That Changed America: The Alamo" was published to be on bookshelves when the movie came out this winter, except that the movie did not come up. I heard it was delayed because there were those outraged that the film has Davy Crockett being captured and executed after the a battle; this goes against the idea that Crockett died heroically while defending the palisade, which is codified in the John Wayne version of the film. In this book author Shelley Tanaka allows that there are different stories told about Crockett's death in a section on the Legends of the Alamo, which talks about William Barrett Travis drawing a line in the sand.The "day that changed America" here is March 6, 1836, which was the day that the Alamo fell after twelve days of being besieged by the army of Mexican President Santa Anna. That morning thousands of Mexican soldiers poured over the walls of the Alamo in the predawn darkness. This is seen as a turning point in American history, although more properly it was the set up for a turning point in Texan history at the Battle of San Jancinto. The perspective here is that the story of the Alamo is told through the eyes of two real-life survivors, eight-year-old Enrique Esparza (who did not tell his story until 1902) and Susanna Dickinson, the mother of baby Angelina and wife of one of the defenders in Travis' command. Complementing the text are carefully researched original paintings by David Craig, historical artifacts, pictorial maps and diagrams, and historic photographs of the Alamo through the years, going back to 1849. "A Day That Changed America: The Alamo" is one of first three volumes in what is going to be a series, the others devoted to Gettysburg and D-Day (hopefully the next round will get beyond battles to events like singing the Declaration of Independence, Black Tuesday, and landing on the moon). Overall, I like the text much more than the paintings, especially in terms of how it winds the personal narratives of the two eyewitnesses with the history of the Texican revolt in general and the battle in particular. This certainly makes this volume stand out from the other juvenile histories of the Alama currently available.