William C. Davis

William C. Davis is a historian of the Civil War, Southern history, and the American frontier. Three Roads to the Alamo follows David Crockett, James Bowie, and William Barret Travis along separate paths that converge during the 1836 siege. HarperCollins issued the original edition during 1998; later Harper Perennial editions retained the fuller subtitle about the men’s lives and fortunes. Davis treats all three as complicated historical actors rather than fixed heroic symbols, using archival research to distinguish documented experience from folklore. He has written or edited more than forty books, taught history, directed programs at Virginia Tech’s Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, and worked in magazine and book publishing. Three Roads to the Alamo connects his biographical method with an interest in how nineteenth-century conflict becomes national memory.