I'm Angela O'Dell and you are listening to real cool history for kids, a podcast show featuring history stories told from a biblical worldview. Welcome to episode 16 of real cool history for kids. In this month's episodes we are going to be learning about some rather complicated

and hard issues in honor of February being Black History Month. I'm going to warn you now that the

stories are hard to hear and understand, and I promise I will do my very best to help you.

In several of our previous episodes, I've told you about the issue of slavery

and how it almost brought a permanent divide to the United States of America in a war that we call the Civil War.

A Civil War is a war that is fought within a country and there is nothing civil about it.

I know that the issue of slavery is a hard one to learn about and it's certainly not a light and funny

story not even in the slightest bit in fact it can make us feel really, really sad and even angry.

We might ask ourselves questions like, how did this happen? Why didn't people do something about it sooner? Why do I have to learn about this and well it's just really upsetting?

Or even could something like this happen now?

As students of history, I believe that it is important to understand the foundational questions of history, like when and where did something happen and who was involved.

But even more importantly, it is so important to know how and why these events

happened. The when, where, and who set the stage, but the how and why

help us to think about it critically and also help us to compare it to the events and issues of our

current world.

Answering and learning the how and why helps us to apply the knowledge that we have gathered

along the way and applied knowledge is wisdom. Wisdom is the as you

in this episode and the next episode because we're going to work through some of the

how and why of what led to what we call the African slave trade and the journey our country, the United States of America,

has been on to, well, to live out the words pinned by Thomas Jefferson. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.

In this episode I'm going to tell you how many strong nations of the world came to use African people stolen from their homes and well sold like animals to build their empires and work their colonies.

I will bring you up to the American Civil War when President Abraham Lincoln declared

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