Remembering the Alamo, Post-9/11

Abstract

IN RECENT YEARS SCHOLARS IN VARIOUS FIELDS have shown increasing interest in historical memory. Informed by anthropology, literary criticism, psychology, linguistics, and cultural studies, recent studies of historical memory have achieved considerable theoretical and analytical sophistication.1 At the same time, building on the work of theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Nora, scholars in the humanities have also shown increasing interest in space and place as analytical concepts. Although scholarship on the American Southwest has always at some level been engaged with both history and place, Richard Flores's groundbreaking new study Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol is among the first in this field to incorporate recent theory from these two areas of research within a historical model.2 Yet to categorize Flores's wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of the Alamo myth as Mexican American, southwestern, or Marxist may be misleading. This book examines both the workings of Ameri-