The words sympathy and empathy sound and look so similar. Both words are nouns and end with the suffix -pathy. This suffix means to suffer. The difference between these words comes from their meaning. Sympathy is sharing a common feeling with somebody, you can show sympathy by experiencing the feeling or not. You show sympathy by comforting in most cases, you don't always really know how the person feels.

  Empathy means you are able to understand the feelings of someone else. This understanding comes from going through the same situation as another person. The main thing of empathy is that a person has the knowledge of another person's feelings, so thinking is a major key to empathy. Empathy is an essential tools for historians because they to be able to put themselves in the situation that others have faced. This will come from thinking deeply into the circumstances and emotions of people from the past.

After studying the timeline of US History from the 1600s to the Civil War, I have learned that one way  the US grew during this time was by acquiring chunks of land. These territories were the Louisiana Purchase, Northwest Ordinance (Ohio), Missouri Compromise, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Kansas), and The Gadsden Purchase. The biggest problem the US face leading up to the Civil War was the battle slavery and non slavery states. These non slavery states believed that no man should own a slave, and slavery states felt they had the right to own blacks. This whole pre-Civil War period was conflicted by differences between different parties. The compromises made between social parties kept the nation united before the Civil War.