Melvin Patrick Ely

This is a really wonderful microhistory of a small county in central Virginia where, in the early nineteenth century, a small group of freed slaves set up a community for themselves in a place they called Israel Hill. Ely does a great job of examining constructions of race and race relations in the antebellum south, challenging both our assumptions about the period and our complacency about race relations in our own time. Ely doesn't argue that slavery was anything less than a barbaric, horrific, shaming institution, but demonstrates the agency which African-Americans could have within the small space allowed them by the white community, and how both communities could recognise the humanity of the other (though the fact that whites were well aware that the people they kept as slaves were as human as they were makes the history of slavery ever more horrific and shaming to think about). The book plods a little towards the middle, but I think only because of the sheer amount of detail which Ely has gathered together to assist in his recreation of this fascinating community and its wider context. There is a lot in this book, but it's well worth the read.… (mere)