- Slovakia (/sloʊˈvækiə, -ˈvɑːk-/; Slovak: Slovensko [ˈslɔʋenskɔ]), officially the Slovak Republic (Slovak: Slovenská republika [ˈslɔʋenskaː ˈrepublika]), is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is bordered by Poland to the north, Ukraine to the east, Hungary to the south, Austria to the west, and the Czech Republic to the northwest. Slovakia’s mostly mountainous territory spans about 49,000 square kilometres (19,000 sq mi), hosting a population exceeding 5.4 million. The capital and largest city is Bratislava, while the second largest city is Košice.
- 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.