I haven’t read the book. And, for the reasons outlined below, I’m not going to.

As far as I can tell, Haas has no academic qualifications in History or any related field. That’s not to say good scholarship can’t be produced by people without academic training, after all it happens all the time on r/AskHistorians. However, it is a bit of a red flag, and it is often a good reason to do a bit more digging on the background of the author and/or the publisher.

One good way of assessing a publication's trustworthiness is examining the venue in which it’s published. Peer-reviewed journal articles are obviously the gold standard, but they can often be overly specific and useful only to other specialists. Monographs published by academic presses (Oxford and Cambridge may be some of the names that immediately spring to mind) are equally reliable and their length means they have room for an author to develop an argument. Looking through the first three monographs related to the Colonial Andes currently on my desk, they’re published by: University of Arizona Press, Duke University Press, and University of Alabama Press. Popular publications by specialists in the field (Like Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything) can be useful, but they can also be a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to editorial rigor so you need to do your due diligence in checking the footnotes. If a popular book doesn’t have footnotes, endnotes, or other forms of in text citation it probably isn’t worth engaging with as a source for historical scholarship. Popular books by non-specialists can be entertaining and sometimes useful, but they’re typically not useful for serious scholarship. Local or regional presses should be approached with caution. They can be great sources for minute details, or for collecting references to primary sources for your own research (I’ve found details on state history that I wouldn’t have found anywhere else), but they typically don’t have the expertise or funds to rigorously fact check. Haas’ book was published by a local press where she (again, without formal training in the field) appears to serve as the main editor. Looks like she’s also one of the owners.

So if Haas is both a) not credentialed in the field and b) acting as author, editor and publisher, it’s definitely worth looking into why she’s making the claims she’s making. For that reason, I decided to look into what else she’s written. If you google “Texas history Michelle Haas”, you find the “Texas Reader”. Most of her contributions to that publication center around railing against Critical Race Theory and “revisionist” Academics. In a similar vein, Haas certainly has a habit of disagreeing with mainstream historians’ views of slavery’s role in 19th century America, and especially in Texas, without providing much supporting evidence of her own. As a result, I’m forced to conclude that at best she’s woefully unqualified, and at worst she wants to downplay the horrors of slavery out of her love of Texas. Either way, she’s not a reliable source.

Edit: typos

You might be interested in the FAQ section on the movie, although I am sure that any more recent responses to that book in particular would be welcome.

I would lift up the comment in one of the links there that Dr. Sue Eakin is an actual historian who released a version of the book after verifying the facts of the original.

Regardless of who Michelle Haas is, Solomon Northup story is undeniably true and there's proofs. As you may know, after Solomon regained his freedom, he quickly wrote a book telling his story. This book became a best seller, for a lack of a better word, and his story became widely known. Now if this would have been the end of it, (he got freed and wrote a book and that's it), today we could have reasonably argued that his story had the potential of being fictitious. We wouldn't have been able to really know or be sure. But his story was fortunately corroborated when Union soldiers passed by the plantation where Solomon was held as a slave. The name of his former master and the other slaves were confirmed to these soldiers who knew about Solomon story and who inquired. Some of these soldiers didn't missed the opportunity to tell their wives about it. There's two letters I know of, and I don't know if there's more, from two soldiers that do not know each other and that were on the plantation where Solomon was held, days apart of each other. The first letter, from Captain Henry Devendorf, was published in the 'Mexico Independant', printed June 18, 1863 :

​

[...] Now for a little item that will be of interest to you. One night before halting, I went on about two miles ahead to look out a camping place. I came to a bridge across the bayou, at a good point, as I supposed, for supplies, on which stood a couple of negroes. I asked one of them, about 30 years old, dressed up pretty well, with a nice silk hat on, what his name was. He answered Bob. “Who do you live with?” “Master Epes” Bob and Epes: Solomon Northrup immediately occurred to me, and I asked him if he ever knew a slave by the name of Platt. “Oh! golly, yes, master!” said he “He raised me. I guess I does know him." He came to our camp at night and proved to be the veritable Bob of Solomon Northrup celebrity, and Massa Epes the same master, and we were then on his plantation, the same that Solomon had worked on so many years ago. I tried to get Bob to go with me, he being an intelligent darkey; but he would not on account of his mother, whom, he said, he must now stay with and support. I found on inquiry among the negroes about that Platt was a very popular darkey among them; also that his story was true. Patsey went away with our army last week, so she is at last far from the caprices of her jealous mistress. [...]

^(Source :) ^(https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/lccn/sn83031559/1863-06-18/ed-1/seq-3/)

​

Another letter was written and published in the 'Lamoille Newsdealer' printed July 2, 1863, from Private John Hall to his wife.

​

Dear Wife:- I have got another opportunity of sending a few lines to you, which I will improve as best I can. My health continues good. [...]

Do you remember our book about Solomon Northrop. I am now very near where he used to live, many negroes on this plantation knew him, he used to fiddle here. After this he lived with Epps. On our way back from Alexandria, I crossed Fords plantation, where Northrop lived before Epps bought him. It is a very pretty place; but I did not know that it was the place, until after I had passed it. If you remember about it, the book speaks of old aunt Phoebe and Patsy, who were whipped, and Bob ; they were all on Epps plantation. When we came here, it was said that aunt Phoebe was there, but the rest have all gone with some soldiers that passed their house. I hope that it will so happen that I can see some of them before I leave this section of country.

^(Source :) ^(https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84023428/1863-07-02/ed-1/seq-1/)

​

Hope this is enough evidence that his story was true and not fake, but if you need more, there's more I'm sure.

Is it true that ‘12 Years A Slave’ is mostly a fake story as claimed by historian Michelle Haas in “200 Years A Fraud”?

No, because Haas doesn't actually say that the basic events of Northup's story aren't true. Here's what she writes in the book:

"Yes, Dr. Sue Eakin spent a lifetime verifying that most of the people and places named in the book were real, but that doesn't make the story built around the armature of those names and places real."

In other words, Haas doesn't deny that Solomon Northup was born a free man, kidnapped from the North, and taken to the South where he lived in slavery for twelve years under a succession of slaveholders, before he managed to escape. Haas’s criticism seems to be that the 1853 book written about these events was written by an unreliable ghostwriter, so any further specifics than that offered in the book shouldn’t be trusted.

Of course, it would help to know who Sue Eakin is that Haas mentions in the quote above. Eakin was a history professor at Louisiana State University, who, in 1968, edited a new edition of Twelve Years a Slave, now published as Twelve Years A Slave: The Enhanced Edition. The preface of her edition explains how she came about the project. As a little girl, she had read the book on the recommendation of a librarian, and it was part of what shaped her into pursuing a career in history. This led to a personal quest to document all the people and places mentioned in the book, to separate fact from fiction, and to place the work in its proper historical context. Her 1968 edition, then, is fully end-noted, with about 80 pages of explanations of who and what is being referred to throughout the original 1853 book.

Twelve Years A Slave was part of the 19th century American genre known as “slave narratives,” a genre which is notoriously unreliable. Almost none of the countless “autobiographies” in this genre were actually written by the enslaved person they were claimed to have been authored by - illiteracy was rampant, so ghostwriters were almost always employed. (Side note that this is one of the things that makes Frederick Douglass’s work so special, because there’s no question he actually wrote the books credited to him.) These works were mostly written for pro-abolition propaganda purposes, so whole events, or even whole chapters, can be fabricated.

In this light, Eakin explains in the third end note of Chapter 1 that the 1853 book was ghostwritten by David Wilson. Nonetheless, the underlying facts as recounted by David Wilson nearly all check out:

"The declaration by Solomon Northup that this is his truthful story of his slave experience on Bayou Boeuf is meant to establish that Solomon vouches for every observation. However, it is important to note that ghost writer David Wilson interviewed Solomon, and portions of the story may have been embellished with his own views. (There were other contributors too, including that of Attorney Henry Northup.) The basic facts of Solomon's journey to Louisiana and his movement through the Bayou Boeuf plantation country during his twelve years as a slave have been validated and provide the framework on which the story is based. Names of people and places are unquestionable. While some of the events said to have transpired are open to question, some errors noted may have resulted from the speed with which this book was written and published, and incorrect names may have been supplied to David Wilson, or he may have simply improvised."

The rest of the end notes don’t really deviate from this. A large proportion of them are references to censuses, slave schedules, ship manifests, wills, and court records to try to identify the people named. Many others are notes about place names and such which have changed over the years. Eakin also makes ample use of surviving court records and newspaper articles to corroborate some of the events Northup’s book described.

In some of the end notes, Eakin points out where Wilson probably just made stuff up, such as in this end note in Chapter 12:

Wilson writes of the whipping of slaves from morning until night; this reported continual whipping raises questions about how such violence against the bodies of slaves might have affected their work and value. While there may have been countless acts of individual cruelty and even a single whipping would be abhorrent, Wilson's claim of around-the-clock whippings may have been a dramatic embellishment to appeal to the book's audience. This continuous violence would have run counter to the unwritten Plantation Survival Code designed to restrain the slaves and maintain the status quo under the strategy described by William Prince Ford in the narrative [see end note 112].

Another Twelve Years A Slave scholar that Michelle Haas singles out in her book as being “meritorious” but nonetheless a target for criticism is David Fiske. Fiske was a librarian who co-authored the book Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave. He later authored two other books on the topic by himself, Solomon Northup: His Life Before and After Slavery and Solomon Northup's Kindred: The Kidnapping of Free Citizens Before the Civil War.

In the first of those three books, Fiske and his co-authors explain that not all the particulars in Twelve Years A Slave can be considered authentic. However, the general sequence of events — that Northup was kidnapped, and then lived in slavery under a series of different slaveholders, who Northup identified by name — is definitely true. "Northup's account has held up to all verification efforts...indicating that the material came from a person who had actually experienced the events related," Fiske, et. al, write. The book goes on to explain:

"The following elements in the book are clearly Northup's: the story line itself; the description of his physical surroundings (e.g., the Great Crocodile Swamp); the descriptions of his social surroundings, the descriptions of the agricultural and manufacturing processes in which he participated (Northup does not attempt to describe those in which he did not participate, such as the ginning of cotton); the descriptions of daily living on the plantation; and the descriptions and assessments of individual people. Northup was in a position to observe or experience all of these; Wilson was not.”

Fiske's books then try to recount Northup's life in a more modern biographical fashion, expanding upon the more modest "end note" treatment of the original text that Eakin's book presented.

Fiske also thoroughly recounts how Northup's story came to public attention — once he escaped, he basically went from slave to celebrity in the course of about a month. His story was national news and written about extensively, as he tried to pursue charges against his kidnappers and slaveholders. A federal judge even ended up helping him out, by giving the names of Northup's alleged kidnappers in sworn testimony (Northup could describe them, but did not know what their names were).

Fiske further goes on to recount how the 1853 book was written, and what happened in Northup's life after that.

cont'd...