Melvin Patrick Ely (the family name rhymes with really) writes and teaches about the history of African Americans and of the South. In his books and other writings, he chronicles the lives that black Americans built for themselves as well as the ways black and white folk have interacted and thought about one another.
Lawrence W. Levine praised Ely for writing wonderfully original
;
books, which probe beyond the received wisdom about race, upset facile
assumptions,
and enable readers to take a deeper look at aspects
of our past and our culture we thought we fully understood.
C. Vann
Woodward credited Ely's writings with bring[ing] new and refreshing
subtlety and complexity to our understanding of American racial attitudes, black
as well as white.
Ely's most recent book, Israel on the Appomattox,
won the Bancroft Prize and several other major awards. In that work, according to
Edward L. Ayers, Ely has recreated an entire world in a forgotten corner
of the slave South
--a world whose people emerge from a dark past
to stand before us in sharp relief
and help us understand the
American South in a new and more profound way.
Ely's work, adds James Oliver
Horton, illuminates the past and, in so doing, poses striking possibilities
for America's future.
Ely, whose family come from Virginia and Tennessee, was born and grew up in Richmond. He has taught at Yale--where he won prizes both for Teaching Excellence and for Outstanding Research and Publication--and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is currently the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia; he received the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award in 2006.
