Building the Digital World of “Twelve Years A Slave”

In 1840 Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. After regaining his freedom, he wrote his memoir, Twelve Years a Slave. In this course we will use Solomon Northup as a way to understand the diverse worlds that existed within antebellum America. We will study his memoir alongside other materials and conduct historical research on the communities he inhabited as a free man and as a slave. Our work will then focus on the construction of a digital archive that captures the people, places, and issues of his time.