We long ago lost count of the number of times self-styled “historian” David Barton has been caught perpetuating historical inaccuracies or outright lies. (The man is nothing if not prodigious.) But on his radio program earlier this week (audio available here), Barton delivered a doozy when discussing the Texas State Board of Education‘s revision of social studies curriculum standards. Here’s what he said as he was complaining about the efforts of civil rights groups to list Tejanos among those who fought at the Alamo during the Texas Revolution:
They ["Hispanic groups"] kept insisting that we have a quota of Hispanics. For example, one of the silly things they said was, well, we want to make sure we show the Tejano leaders at the Alamo. And we pointed out – did you know there were not any Tejano leaders at the Alamo? “Yeah, but you gotta show…” No, there was only one Tejano leader, and he left before the fighting started. He was one of the guys who crossed the line. And are you sure you want to show retreating, you know? And they didn’t even know that. But they were so insistent that they be pictured everywhere even if that group had not been there at the time something happened.
Those “silly” groups don’t know their history? Or is it Barton who is “silly” and uninformed? We asked Dr. Frank de la Teja, professor and chairman of the history department at Texas State University, to weigh in on this question. In 2007 Gov. Rick Perry appointed Dr. de la Teja to serve the first-ever two-year term as the state historian of Texas. So here’s what a real historian has to say about Barton’s claim:
