What effect does it have on a person–a soul, a life–to have freedom and self-respect stripped away and then, ostensibly, returned years later after decades of incarceration? The Exonerated attempts to answer this question through the words of six innocent men and women who, after years in jail, emerged from death row to try to…

Twelve Years a Slave (1853) is a memoir and slave narrative by Solomon Northup, as told to and edited by David Wilson. Northup, a black man who was born free in New York, details his kidnapping in Washington, D.C. and subsequent sale into slavery. After having been kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana…