Essay Assignment: Sleuthing the Alamo
To start this off, I am Nathan Garza, one of your students, a Political Science Major. History to me is very important. It is important because History affects everyone in the past and present. I believe that Politics and History go together hand in hand because they both depend on each other. I have a great respect for History and Political Science. So with that, I have never typed a three-page essay for any class so please bear with me as I answer Question #1. As we read in the first chapter James Crisp reads Sam Houston’s speech to the soldiers at Refugio in January 1836, he was surprised by the very racist words he spoke about during his speech. He didn’t understand why Sam Houston said what…show more content… Crisp found out that through Sam Houston’s decisions such as promoting Juan Seguin to Lieutenant Colonel that it explained that Sam Houston wasn’t in any way racist. In fact, today’s society clearly shows that Houston held the Tejanos dear to him because of their will to fight for Texas independence instead of for Santa Anna’s army. “Houston's men on that April day in 1836 were a unit of "Tejanos," Texans of Hispanic descent who had made the difficult decision to cast their lot with the mostly American-immigrant volunteers who made up the Texan army. Their decision was difficult, but not necessarily because of ethnic differences. Like most settlers of long standing, they were deciding how best to hold onto their land and businesses, how best to keep their families secure. They probably weren't thinking a whole lot about the heroic things that that would be put in the textbooks and speeches during the many decades to come.
An important person stated above was Juan Seguin A loyal friend of Sam’s and a very loyal Texian. “After the revolution, Anglos drove Benavides and his family out of Texas altogether. Something similar happened to the most visible Tejano hero of the Texas Revolution, Juan Seguin. A friend of Stephen F. Austin's, an Alamo defender until he was dispatched to gather reinforcements, and a member of Houston's army at San Jacinto, he was the only Tejano senator of the Texas Republic, as well…show more content… It is believed that the Bartholomae translation was really bad and that the rest of the versions that came after had deleted and added passages from the Erhenberg Diary that made the text of the speech more suitable to read by school children and big audiences. James found out that because of the horrible way it was recorded, (German) translations and added racism from other authors who were able to change up and put more input into the speech made Sam Houston seem more anti-Tejano and anti- Indian than in
