University of Texas Press, 1995

What can one learn about history from a trip to the Alamo? Quite a lot—especially if one is prepared to approach the site with the critical eye and the sensitive ear of the anthropologist. The first lesson to be learned from Holly Brear’s wide-ranging but perhaps too brief study of myth and ritual at this “American shrine” is that history—not the past itself but its contemporary exposition—is viewed by a great many people as something far too important to be left in the hands of historians.