This is how the NYTimes covered '12 Years a Slave' story in 1853

In the waning moments of Sunday night, as the eternal Oscars ceremony was finally coming to a close and the billionth snow storm of the season was moving into the area, Brad Pitt and director Steve McQueen spoke while excepting the Best Picture award for their work on 12 Years a Slave.

The film is based on true accounts of Solomon Northrup, a black man who was kidnapped and forced into slavery in the American South years before the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Northrup was a free man, born and raised in New York. Northrup's awful tale wasn't able to make it to iTunes until 160 years after it unfolded. But, The New York Times was around back then and covered the true events involving Northrup and the authorities that worked to restore his freedom.

...until he found himself chained to the floor of Williams' slave pen in this City, and handcuffed. In the course of a few hours, James H. Burch, a slave-dealer, came in, and the colored man asked him to take the irons off from him, and wanted to know why they were put on. Burch told him it was none of his business. The colored man said he was free and told where he was born. Burch called in a man named Ebenezer Rodbury, and they two stripped the man and laid him across a bench, Rodbury holding his wrists. Burch whipped him with a paddle until he broke that, and then with a cat-o'-nine tails, giving him a hundred lashes, and he swore that he would kill him if he ever stated to anyone that he was a free man.

If you've got the stomach for it, read the whole article, published in The New York Times on January 20, 1853 and re-posted today over at New York magazine.