(Roughly) Daily

While some things stay (surprisingly, gratifyingly, depressingly) the same, there are some things– many things– that really are materially different, both in kind and in degree, from times past.

By way of demonstration, the folks at Globaia have compiled a collection of charts that is stunning (in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word).

to enlarge, click on the image above, or here, and again 

And as to the infrastructure that’s abetted all of this change, see Globaia’s Map of Global Transportation Systems.

[TotH to Curiosity Counts]

As we ponder the implications of so many hockey sticks all in a row, we might recall that Samuel Clemens’– Mark Twain’s– route to writing was round-about: In 1861, Clemens’ brother Orion became secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada; the national-treasure-to-be, having worked as a printer in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, jumped at the offer to accompany his sibling West. Clemens spent his first year in Nevada prospecting for a gold or silver mine.  Out of money, he took a job as reporter for the Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper Territorial Enterprise; his articles on the booming frontier-mining town began to appear on this date in 1862.

Like many journalists of the day, Clemens adopted a pen name, signing his articles “Mark Twain,” a term from his old river boating days.

In 1864, he traveled farther West to cover the booming state of California, where he wrote “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”– the Tall-Tale success of which catapulted Clemens out of the West to become a globe-trotting journalist.

In 1869, Clemens settled in Buffalo, New York, and later in Hartford, Connecticut.  Clemens had spent only about five years in the West, and the majority of his subsequent work focused on the Mississippi River country and the Northeast.  Still, his 1872 account of his western adventures, Roughing It, remains one of the most evocative eyewitness accounts of the frontier ever written.  And surely more importantly, even his non-western masterpieces like Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884), in their playful rejection of Eastern pretense and genteel literary conventions, reflect a frontier sensibility.

Mark Twain, honorary Westerner, by Mathew Brady (source)