Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another persons shoes and then be able to understand, relate, and share the feelings of another, even if they have gone through experiences very different to your own, while sympathy is to share the feelings of another whose experiences are very similar to yours. Empathy is important for historians to have because when looking at history, it is extremely difficult to be able to relate to the feelings that the people living in that time have or even understand how different events impacted their lives. For a historian to have empathy, allows them to further expand their knowledge of historical events to a more personal level and causes that person to look at the events in the past as more than just facts, but as actual events that had an affect on people in that time.

Summary of US History 1600s-Civil War

By reviewing a timeline of US History, I learned a lot about how our country grew. In the beginning of the 1600s to the 1760s, America quickly started to grow from the first American settlement, to the establishment of the original 13 colonies, to the colonial population rising from 275,000 to 1.6 million. This lead to a series of disagreements between the colonists and the British about the British Parliament putting taxes on the colonials, even though the colonists were willing to pay taxes on items that they chose, and then removing themselves from the British Empire. The first government was formed, and they begin making plans for incorporating new lands, which had to be revised multiple times due to the debate on whether or not the states should be slave-holding states. Then in 1790 the government of the united states goes into effect over a population of 4 million americans. new amendments are made, a large portion of the current America was expanded to, including Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, and Texas, and slave importation was banned. Arguments over slavery continues until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in the state of the Confederacy and the Civil War ends with over 50,000 civilian deaths.