Melvin Patrick Ely

Background

Melvin Patrick Ely (the family name rhymes with really) writes and teaches about the history of African Americans and of the South. His book, A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South (Henry Holt, 2026) details interactions between enslaved Black people, slaveholders, and non-slaveholding whites as reflected in six criminal cases in nineteenth-century Virginia.

Ely’s earlier book, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004; Vintage Books, 2005), tells the story of free African Americans in one Virginia county and their relations with whites and enslaved blacks. The book won the Bancroft Prize, the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award for best book on the history of the Americas, the AHA's Wesley-Logan Prize for best book on the history of the African diaspora, the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction, and other recognitions. Israel on the Appomattox was named an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review and the Atlantic and a Best Book of 2004 by the Washington Post Book World and two other metropolitan newspapers.

Melvin Ely has also written The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon (1991; 2nd edition, 2001); that book probes the racial ideas and behavior of black and white Americans as reflected in the popular radio and television series and in the ways people of both races responded to it. Like Israel on the Appomattox, Ely's Amos 'n' Andy was featured on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review, which cited it as a Notable Book of 1991. Ely is coauthor of Un/Bound: Free Black Virginians, 1619-1865 (Virginia Museum of History and Culture, 2025).

In 2006, the governor of Virginia presented the Commonwealth's Outstanding Faculty Award to Ely. During his years on the faculty at Yale University, Ely received both the Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication and Research and the Prize for Teaching Excellence. He served as Fulbright Professor of American Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998-1999 and has taught at Leiden University in The Netherlands.

Ely received his doctoral degree from Princeton University in 1985, and a master's degree in linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 1978.