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Solomon Northup

Solomon Northup (c. 1808 – after 1857) was a free-born New Yorker — violinist, farmer, and landowner — who was kidnapped into slavery in 1841 and held for twelve years in Louisiana. His memoir Twelve Years a Slave remains one of the most powerful firsthand accounts of American bondage: precise, unsentimental, and devastating. Northup's narrative helped fuel abolitionist argument and, much later, a new generation of readers and filmmakers.

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