Grade 9 English – Lesson 116

Lesson 116: Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (1853), Part 1

In 2014, this movie won the Oscar as the best movie of 2013. Lupita Nyong’o. the actress who played Patsey, won the Oscar for best supporting actress. It won for best adapted screenplay. The German actor, Michael Fassbender, who played slave owner Edwin Epps, was nominated for best supporting actor.

The movie is more faithful to the book than most Hollywood historical movies are.

Reading assignment: Chapters 1, 2

Download here.  [download id=”52147″]

If you want to see the original book, click here.  [download id=”52151″]  You get a sense of the typesetting of that era. Sometime around 1800, books began to look much closer to what they do today.

The book was dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).

Twelve years after the publication of the book, legal chattel slavery ended in the United States. It ended in Brazil in 1880. An institution which had existed for as long as there are historical records ended in the West.

The first organized group to identify slavery as morally evil was the Quakers (Socierty of Friends), beginning in colonial America in the late 1600s. In 1761, the Quakers in Great Britain made slave owning a judicial matter. Any Quaker who owned a slave was to be barred from the fellowship — excommunicated.