LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore presents a book signings and discussions with Jim Bevill & Jim Crisp: Talking About Texas, Thursday, April 15, at 6pm. Texans one and all, native and adopted, join Brazos Bookstore for an evening with two Texas historians discussing their new books.

Jim Bevill
The Paper Republic: The Struggle for Money, Credit, and Independence in the Republic of Texas

Offering a new take on the stirring story of the Texas Revolution, James Bevill's The Paper Republic focuses on the financial underpinnings and monetary issues that factored into the struggle. Deftly weaving numismatics and history into an engaging and highly entertaining narrative, the story unveils a verifiable trail of many of the most significant people and events surrounding the struggle for independence in Texas. It is replete with colorful anecdotes about visionary kings, obsessive dictators, crooked politicians, and counterfeiters and includes a detailed history of each piece of coin and currency used in the old Republic.

James P. Bevill is an expert on every aspect of money. He is a wealth management advisor with a primary focus on retirement asset management. He is President of the Texas Numismatic Association and has been elected as an honorary member of the Sons of the Republic of Texas for his preservation of the history of the money and the economy of the Republic of Texas. He has received numerous awards for his work in finance and in numismatics and has written articles on Texas and Confederate money and its role in our culture and history. Jim lives in Houston, Texas with his wife, Jodie.

Jim Crisp
How Did Davy Die?...And Why Do We Care So Much?

Just over thirty years ago, Dan Kilgore ignited a controversy with his presidential address to the Texas State Historical Association and its subsequent publication in book form, How Did Davy Die? After the 1975 release of the first-ever English translation of eyewitness accounts by Mexican army officer José Enrique de la Peña, Kilgore had the audacity to state publicly that historical sources suggested Davy Crockett did not die on the ramparts of the Alamo, swinging the shattered remains of his rifle "Old Betsy." Rather, Kilgore asserted, Mexican forces took Crockett captive and then executed him on Santa Anna's order.

Soon after the publication of How Did Davy Die?, the London Daily Mail associated Kilgore with "the murder of a myth;" he became the subject of articles in Texas Monthly and the Wall Street Journal; and some who considered his historical argument an affront to a treasured American icon delivered personal insults and threats of violence.

Now, in this enlarged, commemorative edition, James E. Crisp, a professional historian and a participant in the debates over the De la Peña diary, reconsiders the heated disputation surrounding How Did Davy Die? and poses the intriguing follow-up question, “. . . And Why Do We Care So Much?”

Crisp reviews the origins and subsequent impact of Kilgore’s book, both on the historical hullabaloo and on the author. Along the way, he provides fascinating insights into methods of historical inquiry and the use—or non-use—of original source materials when seeking the truth of events that happened in past centuries. He further examines two aspects of the debate that Kilgore shied away from: the place and function of myth in culture, and the racial overtones of some of the responses to Kilgore’s work.

Jim Crisp is associate professor and assistant head of the Department of History at North Carolina State University. He contributed previously unpublished material and wrote an introduction to the expanded edition of Carmen Perry’s translation of the De la Peña diary, With Santa Anna in Texas, published by Texas A&M University Press in 1997.