Answer:
The election of Lincoln served as the primary catalyst of the American Civil War. The United States had become increasingly divided during the 1850s over sectional disagreements, especially regarding the extension of slavery into the territories.
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This debate isn't merely historical. As could be gleaned from the flaps surrounding statements by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Interior Secretary Gale Norton during their confirmation periods, issues stemming from the Civil War go to the heart of many current political debates: What is the proper role of the federal government? Is a strong national government the best guarantor of rights against local despots? Or do state governments stand as a bulwark against federal tyranny? And just what rights are these governments to protect? Those of the individual or those of society? Such matters are far from settled.
So why was the Civil War fought? That seems a simple enough question to answer: Just look at what those fighting the war had to say. If we do that, the lines are clear. Southern leaders said they were fighting to preserve slavery. Abraham Lincoln said the North fought to preserve the Union, and later, to end slavery.
Some can't accept such simple answers. Among them is Charles Adams. Given Adams' other books, which include For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization and Those Dirty Rotten Taxes: The Tax Revolts that Built America, it isn't surprising that he sees the Civil War as a fight about taxes, specifically tariffs.
In When in the Course of Human Events, he argues that the war had nothing to do with slavery or union. Rather, it was entirely about tariffs, which the South hated. The tariff not only drove up the price of the manufactured goods that agrarian Southerners bought, it invited other countries to enact their own levies on Southern cotton. In this telling, Lincoln, and the North, wanted more than anything to raise tariffs, both to support a public works agenda and to protect Northern goods from competition with imports.
Openly partisan to the South, Adams believes that the Civil War truly was one of Northern aggression. He believes that the Southern states had the right to secede and he believes that the war's true legacy is the centralization of power in Washington and the deification of the "tyrant" Abraham Lincoln. To this end, he collects all the damaging evidence he can find against Lincoln and the North. And he omits things that might tarnish his image of the South as a small-government wonderland.
Thus, we hear of Lincoln's use of federal troops to make sure that Maryland didn't secede. We don't learn that Confederate troops occupied eastern Tennessee to keep it from splitting from the rest of the state. Adams tells us of Union Gen. William Sherman's actions against civilians, which he persuasively argues were war crimes. But he doesn't tell us of Confederate troops capturing free blacks in Pennsylvania and sending them south to slavery. Nor does he mention the Confederate policy of killing captured black Union soldiers. He tells us that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; he doesn't mention that the Confederacy did also.
Adams argues that Lincoln's call to maintain the Union was at root a call to keep tariff revenues coming in from Southern ports. Lincoln, he notes, had vowed repeatedly during the 1860 presidential campaign that he would act to limit the spread of slavery to the West, but he would not move to end it in the South. Lincoln was firmly committed to an economic program of internal improvements -- building infrastructure, in modern terms -- that would be paid for through higher tariffs. When the first Southern states seceded just after Lincoln's election, Adams argues, it was to escape these higher taxes. Indeed, even before Lincoln took office, Congress -- minus representatives from rebel Southern states -- raised tariffs to an average of almost 47 percent, more than doubling the levy on most goods.
The correct answer is the last one: The protests began with citizens calling for democratic reforms, but as protests spread, Islamic fundamentalists began demanding that Sharia law be established.
The Arab Spring started in Tunisia, when Muhammad Bouazizi, a young street vendor committed self-immolation as a form of protest against the confiscation of his wares and the oppression of the regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This sparked anger in his country, which led to a series of protests that concluded in the overthrown of the dictatorial regime and the subsequent establishment of a democracy in the country. The Tunisian revolution inspired people in many other Arab countries with similar political systems to do the same and reclaim a democratic transformation.
The wave of the Arab Spring went through Lybia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrein among others, but it didn't end up so well in most of these countries. In fact, the uprising against dictatorial but secular governments paved the way for extremist Islamist groups on the prowl.
In Syria, Islamist groups that were fighting in Iraq took advantage of the attempt of Syrian protesters to overthrow the regime of Al Assad in order to extend their dominion and establish an Islamist Caliphate ruled by the Sharia law. The Syrian civil war was the result of this and many terrorist groups united to form the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a terrorist organization that committed several atrocities across these countries.
In Egypt, after the fall of Mubarak's regime, there were democratic elections where the Muslim Brothers won, threatening with an Islamist turn in the State and the application of the Sharia law. To avoid this the army carried out a <em>coup d'etat </em>establishing a military dictatorship.