If your plans for the season involve seeing a movie, including perhaps 12 Years a Slave, we hope you’ll also make time for a bit of reading. After viewing Steve McQueen’s acclaimed adaptation, you can find a number of editions of Solomon Northup’s account of his time in slavery available to read for free from HathiTrust. The edition digitized from our own collections here at the University of Michigan includes the full text of the book, as well as striking illustrations.
HathiTrust is a partnership of over eighty research libraries worldwide to preserve and provide access to the cultural record. Out of a total of nearly eleven million items, over three million historical, governmental, and literary works in the public domain are available to read for free online.