Wikipedia:Today's featured article/April 11, 2004

The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex problems of slavery, expansion, sectionalism, parties, and politics of the antebellum era. As territorial expansion forced the United States to confront the question of whether new areas of settlement were to be slave or free, as the power of the slaveholders in national politics waned, and as the North and the South developed starkly divergent economies and societies, the divisive issues of sectionalism catapulted the nation into the Civil War. (more...)

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