Empathy vs. Sympathy

       Empathy is the intellectual identification or vicarious experience of the feelings, thought, or attitudes of another. Sympathy is experiencing feelings of pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune.
       Feeling empathy for someone is not only possible if you have been in the same situation. I can Empathy for a slave owner in the 1800s. I do not support slavery at all and I think that it is terrible and I could never be a slave owner. I am able to feel empathy for the never the less because I am able to put myself in there shoes. I am able to think about how they must have thought it was not that bad because so many other people had slaves and it was not a big of a deal in the 1800s. Empathy is a key skill in studying history so that you are able to better understand why people in history did what they did and so that you will not judge them or study them with a bias view.