January 18 · This Day in America
Thomas Jefferson asks Congress for two thousand five hundred dollars. The request is confidential, and deliberately small, dressed up as a venture to extend external commerce. The real ask is the continent. Jefferson wants men to walk out past the edge of the map — up the Missouri, over whatever mountains there are, all the way to the Pacific — and bring back the geography, the rivers, the plants and animals, the peoples, the weather of a half of North America no American government has ever seen. He keeps it quiet so Spain, France, and Britain won't move to block it. Congress says yes. From that modest line item comes Lewis and Clark, the Corps of Discovery, and the moment the young republic stops being a strip along the Atlantic and starts imagining itself ocean to ocean. The whole American West begins as a sentence the President didn't want read aloud.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1966
Robert Clifton Weaver is sworn in as the first Secretary of Housing and Urban Development — and the first African American ever to sit in a President's Cabinet. An economist who spent decades fighting housing discrimination, he now runs the federal department in charge of where Americans live. One hundred and ninety years into the republic, the Cabinet table finally has a Black man at it. He had spent his career making the case. Now he had the chair.
Source: time.com