Jason Lee, continuing to found missions in the Oregon Country, has become increasingly active in the territorial organization of the settlement, encouraging its ties with the United States.

In early 1837, Lee had participated in the Willamette Cattle Company along with Ewing Young in order to procure cattle for the mission, investing in the venture that was designed to break the cattle monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company in the region.

Though Lee was on the ship Loriot that took the company to California, Lee did not sail with them.

Also in 1836, then in 1837, he had helped to draft a petition for the establishment of a territorial government, and in 1838 he journeys east to present the petition in Washington, D.C., stopping at the Whitman Mission near Fort Walla Walla to visit Marcus and Narcissa.

The first religious women to set foot on Australian soil—five nuns from the Religious Sisters of Charity in Ireland, arrive in in 1838; they will later open a convent in Parramatta.

New dynasties have led the Uzbek khanates to a period of recovery in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

These dynasties are the Qongrats in Khiva, ...

...the Manghits in Bukhara, and ...

...the Mins in Quqon.

These new dynasties have established centralized states with standing armies and new irrigation works.

But their rise has coincided with the ascendance of Russian power in the Kazak steppes and the establishment of a British position in Afghanistan.

By the early nineteenth century, the region is caught between these two powerful European competitors, each of which tries to add Central Asia to its empire in what will come to be known as the Great Game.

The Central Asians, who do not realize the dangerous position they are in, continue to waste their strength in wars among themselves and in pointless campaigns of conquest.

Friedrich Bessel makes the first accurate measurement of distance to a star in 1838.

Starting in 1819, Bessel has determined the position of over fifty thousand stars using a meridian circle from Reichenbach, assisted by some of his qualified students.

The most prominent of them is Friedrich Wilhelm Argelander.

With this work done, Bessel iss able to achieve the feat for which he is best remembered today: he is credited with being the first to use parallax in calculating the distance to a star.

Astronomers have believed for some time that parallax would provide the first accurate measurement of interstellar distances—in fact, in the 1830s there has been a fierce competition between astronomers to be the first to measure a stellar parallax accurately.

In 1838 Bessel wins the race, announcing that 61 Cygni has a parallax of 0.314 arcseconds; which, given the diameter of the Earth's orbit, indicates that the star is 10.3 light years away.

Given the current measurement of 11.4 light years, Bessel's figure has an error of 9.6%.

Nearly at the same time Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve and Thomas Henderson measure the parallaxes of Vega and Alpha Centauri.

Bertel Thorvaldsen's statue of the resurrected Christ, commonly referred to as Thorvaldsen's Christus, has appealed to the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and a three point four meter eplica is on display at Temple Square and images of the statue are used in official church media, such as the internet site LDS.org.

Thorvaldsen had attended Copenhagen's Royal Danish Academy of Art (Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi), winning all the prizes including the large Gold Medal.

As a consequence, he had been granted a Royal stipend, enabling him to complete his studies in Rome, where he arrived on March 8, 1797.

Thorvaldsen's first success had been the model for a statue of Jason, highly praised by Antonio Canova, the most popular sculptor in the city.

In 1803, he received the commission to execute it in marble from Thomas Hope, a wealthy English art-patron.

From that time Thorvaldsen's success had been assured, and he did not leave Italy for sixteen years.

In 1819 he visited his native Denmark, where he had been commissioned to make the colossal series of statues of Christ and the twelve Apostles for the rebuilding of Vor Frue Kirke (from 1922 known as the Copenhagen Cathedral) between 1817 and 1829, after its having been destroyed in the British bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807.

Executed after his return to Rome, they are not completed until 1838, when Thorvaldsen returns to Denmark, hailed as a hero of the arts.

Portuguese investment in the Indian Ocean trade had lagged after the Arab seizure of Portugal's key foothold at Fort Jesus on Mombasa Island (now in Kenya) in 1698; Lisbon has since devoted itself to the more lucrative trade with India and the Far East and to the colonization of Brazil.

The Mazrui and other Omani Arab tribes have reclaimed much of the Indian Ocean trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, forcing the Portuguese to retreat south.

Other European powers, particularly the British and the French, begin to become increasingly involved in the trade and politics of the region.

Into the nineteenth century, a system has prevailed of dividing the land into prazos (large agricultural estates) which the natives cultivate for the benefit of the European leaseholders, who are also tax-collector for each district and claim the tax either in labor or produce, a system that keeps the sharecropping farmers in a state of serfdom.

Direct Portuguese influence is limited.

On the coast between several native ports of call and Madagascar a large surreptitious trade supplies slaves for Arabia and the Ottomans.

European traders and prospectors barely penetrate the interior regions.

Many of the Shona people of the defunct Rozwi Empire have been incorporated; the rest of the Shona groupings have been made satellite territories that pay tribute to the Ndebele Kingdom.

Mzilikazi calls his new nation Mthwakazi, a Zulu word which means something that became big at conception, in Zulu "into ethe ithwasa yabankulu.”

The territory will come to be known as Matabeleland.

Mzilikazi organizes this ethnically diverse nation into a militaristic system of regimental towns and establishes his capital at Bulawayo.

The Ashanti (Asante) do not long maintain the rather one-sided peace treaty of 1831.

In 1838, when Kwaku Dua (reigned 1838-67) succeeds Osei Yaw Akoto as asantehene (king of the Ashanti), his councilors persuade him to reopen the war against the Assin, Akim and Denkyera.

Thus the uneasy seven-year peace ends—a time during which trade has increased and Wesleyan missionary work had begun on the Gold coast, thanks to the support of George Maclean, Governor of Cape Coast from 1830.

In his efforts to achieve peace, Maclean is hindered by the Danes at Christiansborg and the Dutch at Elmina.

The former claim control of Accra and are endeavoring to establish a protectorate over Akwapim, Akim and Krobo.

The Dutch are suspected of intriguing with the Asante to resume the slave trade and of encouraging them to attack the coastal tribes again by supplying them with arms.