Sympathy vs. Empathy

Although sympathy and empathy sound very similar, and many people relate them to each other, they have many differences. A few similarities between the two words include that they have to do and are involved with someone else, and they both have something to do with feeling. The definition of sympathy is feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune. This word is more involved with feeling and emotion towards someone else. The definition of empathy is the intellectual identification or various experience of the feelings, thoughts, and attitudes of others. Empathy has less to do with feeling, than sympathy, and more to do with understanding, and putting yourself in someone else's shoes. Some key words that also go along with empathy include, knowledge, experience, imagination, and thinking about feeling. Empathy is an essential tool for historians, because it can make them think about what each historical figure was thinking when something significant happened, such as the Holocaust. The historian can empathize and try to understand what many of the jews went through to gain better knowledge about the topic, and try to understand what Hitler was thinking and why it occurred. Empathy also allows for historians to understand why certain leaders made poor decisions for their countries, because imagining and understanding certain situations can help to gain this knowledge.

United State's Come About

While reading the United States timeline, I learned the order of which many famous events occurred, and how the US grew as a nation. The US grew as a nation through countless numbers of compromises. Slavery, the forming of the new constitution, amendments, buying land, wars, and many other components went into these compromises, which helped shape the country today. These were not always easy compromises, and brought many great challenges to the country. One of the greatest challenges in the pre-Civil War era was slavery. There were many debates on which states should have slaves, and if these slaves should be included in the population count. Each time a new state was bought and joined the country the leaders had to decide if it would be slave free or not.  Another challenge includes the constitution and how it was made. The country first started out using the Articles of Confederation, but at once realized that it would not work, for it didn't have near as much power to raise revenues and enforce any policies. The constitutional convention was then held where they completely changed the government system so that everything was more fair, more laws could be passed, and there would be more power and money involved. Because of these compromises, the nation would stay united, until Abraham Lincoln became president, being one of the reasons of the Civil War.