Over a century after it ended, the Civil War remains the fundamental【B1】_____in American history. It produced a loss of life【B2】

Over a century after it ended, the Civil War remains the fundamental (26) turning point in American history. It produced a loss of life (27) unprecedented in the American experience. The 620,000 combatants who perished in the conflict nearly outnumber those who died in all other American wars (28) combined.
The conflict also (29) permanently affected the future course of national development. In the physical destruction it brought to the South, the economic changes it produced (30) throughout the nation, the new technologies it diffused, and the new ideas it spawned, the war altered the lives of several generations of Americans.
Slavery lay at the root of the crisis that produced the Civil War. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the Union divided into two distinctive regions, one (31) dependent on slave labor, and the other evolving into an urban, industrialized society. As the South united in defense of a way of life (32) based on slavery, the North increasingly celebrated the superiority of free labor.
(33) Slavery, and especially its extensions into the western territories, became the focus of a bitter national debate that divided churches, shattered political parties, and helped bring on a military confrontation that lasted four years.
The North went to war to preserve the Union after eleven Southern states (34) seceded in 1860 and 1861. In time, the conflict became a struggle to destroy slavery and emancipate African Americans in bondage.
Union victory ended slavery, nation, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, a “new birth of freedom”. Yet the war left it to the future generations to (35) confront the legacies of slavery and to embark on the still unfinished struggle for racial justice.