All the Difference posts are about those people (and ideas) who dared to step off the busy highway and to follow one less worn for wear. Away from the crowds, these individuals walk to their own beat, with unexpected and singular results that may not always be for everyone, but that, my guess, was never the point.

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It was 1835. With little more than 50 years past the boot given to the British in our War of Independence, and only 20 years out of boot #2 from the War of 1812, a young America heard a newborn’s cry. Running with the unrestrained speed of a people newly cut loose, the fledgling country already was at a number of crossroads from all its people and ideas on the move. Abolitionists, Expansionists, Industrialists, Feminists, Capitalists, Unionists. Iron horses would soon replace the flesh and bones type, and water and its heated sibling, steam, would forever change the nation through cogs and gears, tracks and wheels. World blights and the eternal dream of a better life would provide cheap labor and transform a young nation from a backwoods land to a backwoods land with potential. It was a time when people’s optimism was as immense as the land they sought to tame. And their challenge and rejection of the legitimacy of another voice speaking for them left them ripe for their own. They would find it in this baby born in a small town on the fringe of the American frontier: Samuel Clemens.

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