“A little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie” was what the inventor, science-fiction writer, and chicken farmer Milo Hastings once called Waco. For most of my life, that’s how America has seen my hometown, as a byword for small-town parochialism and the televised death-by-government gunfire of David Koresh. But wind the clock back to the 1890s, and you’ll see Waco billed not only as “Six Shooter Junction” but also “The Athens of Texas.”  There is a strange double nature to Waco, at one moment bursting at the seams with cosmopolitan ambition and at another recoiling into isolation. Waco is the great forgotten American city, a stage on which the American Drama has played out for almost 200 years and the Human Drama thousands of years before that. Some nights it’s a tragedy, other nights a comedy.  Fresh off the train following Gettysburg, my great-great-great-grandfather John Sligh was deployed in northern Georgia at the Battle of Chickamauga. At his side were his …