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Zusatztext 77485867 Informationen zum Autor Melvin Patrick Ely, a native of Richmond, Virginia, took undergraduate and graduate degrees in history at Princeton University, studied linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, University of Virginia. He has taught in public high schools in Virginia and Massachusetts, at Yale University, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since 1995 he has taught at the College of William and Mary, where he is currently Newton Family Professor of History and Black Studies. He is the author of The Adventures of Amos 'n' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon , and co-translator, with Naama Zahavi-Ely, of The Handicap Principle: A Missing Piece of Darwin's Puzzle , by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi. Klappentext WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZEA New York Times Book Review and Atlantic Monthly Editors' ChoiceThomas Jefferson denied that whites and freed blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife. Slavery cast its grim shadow, even over the lives of the free, yet on Israel Hill we discover a moving story of hardship and hope that defies our expectations of the Old South. Chapter 1 The View from Israel Hill, 1863 In the winter of his ninety-ninth year, Sam White looked out from his Virginia farmhouse by the railroad tracks, across the gentle slope of Israel Hill, his home of five decades, and onto a world that was reminding him yet again what a remarkable life he had led. White was one of the few Americans left who personally remembered the Revolution that his fellow Virginians had championed and the first years of the Republic they had built. Now, early in 1863, the grandsons of those same Virginians were killing and dying in the scores of thousands to break up that Union. The once glorious, now tragic history of his state and his country formed only the latest chapter in a life of paradox. On the one hand, Sam White was in many ways a typical Southerner of his time, if there was such a thing. He owned a farm, but only a small one; he, his father, and his three brothers had cleared their own land and built unpretentious but comfortable houses on it. Like two thirds of the households in the South, White and his neighbors farmed their tracts with little or no help from slaves. Sam White's sons and daughters, nephews, nieces, and grandchildren could grow, raise, hunt, or catch much of the food they needed; they cut timber from the back sections of their hundred acres to construct houses and outbuildings, repair their fences, cook their meals, and keep warm during the winter. They earned cash to satisfy their other wants by raising tobacco and vegetables. Like many other small landowners in the South, some of the men in the White family had found ways besides farming to earn money. A few worked at carpentry, coopering, or other crafts. Two of Sam White's brothers, one of his sons, and a nephew or two had poled cargo boats, or batteaux, filled with hogsheads of tobacco and barrels of wheat down the nearby Appomattox River to market at Petersburg. In more recent years, some Whites had taken work in the small tobacco factories of nearby Farmville, a growing center of trade for the area. Just now, though, there were few...
“Fascinating . . . . No less than a systematic deconstruction of the ways in which many Americans have come to think of race, slavery, and the Old South.” –The *Boston Globe
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"Fascinating . . . . Ely’s story is so rich and compelling–and so persuasively documented–that it is sure to leave its mark on Southern history for years to come." –The Washington Post Book World
 
“Israel on the Appomattox [is one of] the first works that attempt to describe with precision the texture of day-to-day interaction across the color line. . . . A remarkably rich story.” –Atlantic Monthly
 
“[An] absorbing story . . . . The value of this book lies in the many stereotypes the author has debunked.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
"Previous historians have described the limits of free blacks' freedom. But none has examined the quality of their lives in the detail or with the sophistication of Melvin Patrick Ely in Israel on the Appomattox . . . . A striking portrait . . . . Ely hopes to shift the emphasis in the study of free blacks from disempowerment to accomplishment, and he goes a long way toward reaching this goal." *–Los Angeles Times*
 
“A remarkable civics lesson in hope, strength, endurance and quiet courage that most will find important and uplifting.” –Rocky Mountain News
 
“Compelling, well-written, and thoroughly researched. The author knows Israel Hill and Prince Edward County inside and out, and his study is clearly a labor of love. . . . [Ely] challenges many of our assumptions concerning white and black Southern life in the antebellum period.” –Civil War Book Review
 
“Ely brings to life the black personages who demonstrated that self-determination was possible in the South prior to the Civil War . . . . A rare slice of history recounted by an uncommonly fastidious historian who is as passionate about the Hill as he is about the Israelites who dwelled there.” –Black Issues Book Review
 
“[Ely] explores as few others have done the meaning of independence, of the metaphor of a river in America, and the role of faith and brotherly love.” –Decatur Daily
 
“An astonishing act of historical research and imagination. Ely has given us the fullest and most humane account we have ever had of free black people.” –Edward L. Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863
 
“Israel on the Appomattox recovers a fascinating biracial world–right in the middle of the slave-based Old South. . . . The book shows whites, enslaved blacks, and, most especially, freed blacks working, living, trading, competing, cooperating, fighting, and (at least occasionally) loving together, in and around a special little place called by the freedpeople Israel Hill. The story stretches from the Virginia of Thomas Jefferson to the Virginia of Appomattox Court House. And it is extraordinary–inspiring and heartbreaking by turns.” –John Demos, author of The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America
 
“This remarkable account . . . is rich with new insights on the dimensions of bondage and freedom in the slave South. The author's meticulous research and elegant writing make the experience of reading it both a reward and a pleasure.” –James M. McPherson, author of Battle Cry of Freedom
 
“Israel on the Appomattox is a surprising and often heartening story of human struggle, personal dignity and complex interracial cooperation in the deep shadow of slavery. It upends traditional assumptions about race in the Old South and, in so doing, poses striking possibilities for America’s future.” –James Oliver Horton, co-author of Slavery and the Making of America
 
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