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 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 Newton Family Professor of History and Black Studies at the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.

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.

And, in a different field . . .

English Version: Naama Zahavi-Ely

and Melvin Patrick Ely