Learn, love Texas stories

San Antonio Living History Association and Communicate SA recreated the siege of the Alamo several times in the 13 days leading up to the anniversary of the fall of the Alamo in 1836.

Communications and radio-television-film students from this college provided technical support for the re-enactment.

Any idea what life was like in 1830s Texas? Do you know why Texas fought a revolution?

Armed with an Alamo Colleges ID, students can find answers by visiting the Institute of Texan Cultures without charge. Your ID also opens the doors to the San Antonio Museum of Art and McNay Art Museum.

The Texana Room in the Central Library — a few blocks south of the college — contains valuable material on local and family history. Texas and San Antonio have a rich and detailed — and often bloody — history. For those fond of action, adventure and pioneering spirit, the history of the Lone Star State has much to offer.

Maybe you are among those who don’t care what happened before you were born.

In an online essay by Peter N. Sterns, the American Historical Association offers two reasons for caring: History helps us understand people and societies, and history helps us understand change and how the society we live in came to be.

Learning the history of a place connects us to it. San Antonio alone offers a treasure trove of history, but the rest of the state is just as rich. For example, on Congress Avenue in downtown Austin is a statue of a woman firing a cannon. It commemorates Angelina Eberly, who kept the Texas Rangers from stealing government archives in the dead of night on President Sam Houston’s orders. He wanted the capital to be his namesake city.

How can you resist stories about the characters who people Texas history?