Reviewed by: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth by Bryan Burrough et al Katherine Kuehler Walters Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. By Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. (New York: Penguin Press, 2021. Pp. xxx, 386. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 978-1-9848-8011-6; cloth, $32.00, ISBN 978-1-9848-8009-3.) Most famous for the thirteen-day battle in 1836, the Alamo has been central to far longer political battles during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As another fight rages, journalists Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford enter the fray with Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth to do what historians have been trying to do for decades—dismantle the Anglo-centric mythology, called here the "Heroic Anglo Narrative," of the Alamo and the Texas Revolution (p. xxv). This narrative, born in the nineteenth century, stripped the Texas Revolution of its roots in slavery and essentialized the war into a simplistic binary of liberty-loving Anglos backed by manifest destiny versus racially inferior Latinos led by a bloodthirsty tyrant. After traveling hand in hand with the Lost Cause mythology into Texas textbooks, onto monuments and the silver screen, and through the public discourse of heritage organizations and politicians, this mythology seems more resistant to change than its Confederate companion. To convince a general audience to forget the Alamo myths and recognize that, as the book jacket copy contends, "celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness," Burrough, Tomlinson, and Stanford first lead readers through the current, dominant interpretation of events that led to and occurred during the Texas Revolution. The first eleven chapters start in 1803 and emphasize slavery's central importance to Anglo-American migration, Tejanos' and Anglos' economic interests, and concerns over the dissolution of the constitution of 1824. Tejanos' contributions to the Texas cause and the postwar racist backlash they faced are also covered. The book's second half chronologically weaves together the creation and evolution of the Alamo's Heroic Anglo Narrative in American culture and the development of the Alamo as a physical space from a crumbling fort to the present-day inclusive but divisive plan to reimagine the Alamo site around the questionable artifact collection of British rock star Phil Collins. This method effectively elucidates the historic site's role in disseminating myths, perhaps best exemplified by William B. Travis's so-called line in the sand, considered fictitious as early as the 1880s but memorialized at the Alamo with a brass line installed in 1988 by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. The Alamo's elevation to a national symbol during the Cold War and the participation in myth-building of professional historians, politicians, and popular films add to the last few chapters' discussion of recent pressures to retrench the narrative into the school curriculum and at the historic site. [End Page 598] The authors readily admit that much of the information is not new, and they credit in the text, bibliography, and sparse citations a long list of historians on whose work they relied. However, some nuance and complexity is lost, including the intricacies of slavery in Mexico. The book mischaracterizes a nearby Woolworth's lunch counter as "one of the first San Antonio restaurants to begin serving Black patrons" (its March 1960 integration was likely the first for this national chain in a major southern city). But the issue is also discussed as a "myth," which undermines local African Americans' efforts for historical preservation on the Alamo Plaza (p. 303). Still, Forget the Alamo will hold some surprises for southern historians with its coverage of efforts to restore Tejanos to the narrative by LULAC and Adina De Zavala; its mention of Elena Zamora O'Shea's novella El Mesquite (1935); its discussion of the racist impact of school field trips on Latino children; and its description of the current political battles tied to memorialization and the 1836 Project. Forget the Alamo's bold, straightforward language backed by forty years of academic research has hit the right nerve. The Texas lieutenant governor blocked a book event...