Empathy and History

While empathy and sympathy sound alike, they are very different. Sympathy means the feeling of sorrow for somebody else's bad fortune, while empathy is the ability to understand the feelings of others. One can empathize without having the experience by putting themselves in the other shoes. Even though i was never alive in the civil rights times, i could put myself in a persons situation at that time and realize how normal those horrible things were of the time. Being able to empathize is key skill in history because it lets you put yourself in the shoes of others and see the reasons they did the things they did, while many wouldnt do so and just judge on their actions.