Welcome to Finding Medina.

Bonus episode number two, the most important primary account of the Battle of Medina.

I'm Brandon Seal.

This is a podcast dedicated to the Battle of Medina.

Yet in some way, I've come to feel that historical projects that devote all their time to battles

do a profound disservice to the lives of the people that we profess to be studying.

Defining entire historical periods by battles would be like defining

a human life by viewing only a wedding video, or maybe a divorce proceeding is a better analogy.

The outcomes of battles, weddings, and divorce proceedings are all important, of course, and

they're all cinematic and high-stakes

affairs, but in the end, they're brief and not particularly representative of what the rest of life

is like. Throughout this series, I've kind of actively withheld one source from you so that I could save it for now.

It is, to my knowledge, the only known Republican primary account of the battle and the aftermath written by a techano.

Tellingly, the battle occupies only about 10% of the account.

The rest is taken up with narrating the individual horrors suffered by the civilians of San Antonio,

particularly the women, after Ardondo's royalist army sacked and occupied the town.

This makes it probably a more accurate rendering of the experience of the people in Texas

in 1813 than the dozen or so battle-only accounts that we've reviewed. After the really

emotional feedback that we received for our reading of the original Texas Declaration of

Independence, we've decided to recreate

that experience here as well.

This, too, is one of those documents that needs to be entered into the historical record

...