The Smithsonian is founded

The bequest is among the strangest in the history of science, and why he made it has never been explained. The institution became the United States' national research apparatus before the country had any other: it ran meteorological observations across the continent, funded excavation, and published. Cyrus Thomas's survey of the eastern mounds, published in 1894, refuted the myth of a vanished “mound builder race” by digging — one of the clearest cases of systematic fieldwork overturning a politically useful belief.