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.