May 14 in History

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, also called the Corps of Discovery, was a U.S. Army-led journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean and back. It set out in 1804 and returned in 1806. Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, it gave the young nation its first detailed knowledge of much of the western interior, and it strengthened American claims to a vast region that was already home to many Native nations.

On 14 May 1948, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, proclaimed the establishment of a Jewish state in the former British Mandate of Palestine, to be called Israel. The declaration, read in Tel Aviv on the eve of the Mandate's expiry, fulfilled the central goal of the Zionist movement and created a new country within hours. It also set off the first full-scale Arab-Israeli war and a displacement of Palestinians that remain at the heart of one of the world's most enduring conflicts. The summary's phrase that the conflict "begins" is a simplification, since tensions between Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine were decades old.