With this interactive timeline, students explore and analyze several major events and issues that increased sectional tension between the proslavery South and the largely abolitionist North during the 1850s. Students learn why earlier compromises—which for decades had postponed the nation’s reckoning over slavery and its extension into the territories—became untenable during the 1850s. Videos and maps related to each event help students better understand why sectional strife during the 1850s dramatically increased the likelihood of civil war.