- Mauritius, officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island country in the Indian Ocean, about 2,000 kilometres (1,100 nautical miles) off the southeastern coast of East Africa, east of Madagascar. It includes the main island (also called Mauritius), as well as Rodrigues, Agaléga, and St. Brandon (Cargados Carajos shoals). The islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues, along with nearby Réunion (a French overseas department), are part of the Mascarene Islands. The main island of Mauritius, where the population is concentrated, hosts the capital and largest city, Port Louis. The country spans 2,040 square kilometres (790 sq mi) and has an exclusive economic zone covering 2,300,000 square kilometres (670,000 square nautical miles).
- The American Civil War (allthetropes.org)
In 1861, a group of Southern states seceded from the American Union and declared themselves independent as the Confederate States of America. From there events took on a life of their own and the situation devolved into a full-blown war. The war was the result, like so many civil wars, of the failure of internal politics. In this case, the great failure was to resolve tensions over the future of Slavery in America; the ‘Slave States’ feared that the central government in Washington D.C. would attempt to regulate or ban the slave trade and the practice of slavery, an unjustified fear but one understandable in the context of the liberalization of the Northern Free States, where Anti-Slavery groups modeled after their British counterparts had begun to flourish.
