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.