"Every act of historical understanding is an act of empathy."

Dick Morris on a new theory about the inevitability of the Civil War.

From our safe perspective, we often forget that real people were living through real events. I'd known about the Nat Turner Rebellion and the Haitian revolt, but I hadn't thought about how those events could "radicalize" the South and cement a change in its attitude from slavery as an evil that would eventually die to slavery as a noble institution.