MELVIN
PATRICK ELY
Historian and Teacher

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 has 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.” The late
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. 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
Ely,
whose family come from
For a somewhat fuller biography, click here.
For some
thoughts on the connections between personal experience and historical
interpretation, click
here.
Ely's
literary agent is Richard Balkin.
For information on a particular book, click on its cover
below.