May 14 · This Day in America
At four in the afternoon, in front of a crowd of neighbors gathered on the bank, William Clark gives the order and the keelboat noses into the Missouri's current. The Corps of Discovery — some four dozen men, soon a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, and Clark's enslaved companion York — is heading into a continent that no one in Washington can map. President Jefferson has just doubled the country with the stroke of a pen on the Louisiana Purchase; now he wants to know what he bought. Ahead lie 8,000 miles, two and a half years, grizzly bears, the Rockies, and the Pacific. They will be given up for dead and then walk back into St. Louis alive. America's idea of itself as a thing that goes west, that keeps going, begins on a gentle breeze on this afternoon.
Source: lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu
Also on this day · 1948
In Tel Aviv, David Ben-Gurion declares the State of Israel into being at midnight. In Washington it is 6:11 p.m., and over the furious objections of his own State Department, President Truman has the press release typed and handed out: "This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed." The first nation on earth to recognize Israel, and it took eleven minutes.
Source: www.archives.gov
“I Set out at 4 oClock P. M. … and proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missourie”William Clark, journal, May 14, 1804