Littlefield Lecture

Melvin Patrick Ely

William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities & Professor of History Emeritus
College of William & Mary

Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings. A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South (Henry Holt and Co,. April 2026) is a history of relationships between slave owners, Life in the Slaveholding South is a history of relationships between slave owners, slaveless whites, and enslaved Black people as revealed in six criminal cases from a Virginia county. As historian Kate Masur writes in the New York Times Book Review, "Ely convincingly reveals how the antebellum social order was defined both by violent white supremacy and by a surprising variety of interracial relationships."

Melvin Patrick Ely is the author of Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War, which won the Bancroft Prize, and The Adventures of Amos ’n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon. Ely is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor Emeritus of History at the College of William & Mary, having earlier taught history and African American studies at Yale. He lives in Richmond, Virginia. Learn more about his scholarship and publications on his home page. and faculty profile page. 

Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2026
Time: 5:00 PM
Venue: Robert L. Patton Building (RLP) 0.102
Address: 305 E 23rd St., Austin, TX 78712
Free and Open to the Public.