Robert and Phebe (Watson) Jackson with children William, Robert, Martha and Martha Jane immigrate to America in 1845. The first settlrd in the Davenport, Iowa area where they resided until 1853 when they moved to Cincinnati, Ohio.  In 1853, they moved to Franklin County, Indiana settling near Peppertown.  Robert and his wife Phoebe, their son Robert and his wife Rebecca Cupp Jackson are buried at Stipps Hill Cemetery, near Buena Vista in Franklin County, Indiana.

James K. Polk is President of the United States of America: He was a shrewd and adroit politician in full control of his administration. This, despite the often conflicting advice from the diverse and feuding factions of the Democratic Party. A significant number of letters are written by Polk himself and they reveal a president in full command refusing to take directions from either the Van Buren or Calhoun factions. The former, already angry with the man who denied him the nomination, lectured him over the need for patience in his appointments: "To be prompt it is by no means necessary to be hasty". In response and in defense of his appointment of Van Buren's arch rival, New Yorker William Marcy, to be secretary of war, Polk reminded Van Buren that it was "indispensable to compose my cabinet of men, who had a public reputation throughout the Union, and who would give weight of character to the administration, the moment they were announced".

Themes run through the correspondence of the first half of 1845. One is Polk's closeness with his dying mentor, Andrew Jackson. Communication between the two reflects the importance of Jackson's advice to the young president until letters from Nashville friends tell of Old Hickory's passing in June. At the same time, Polk's anxiety over whether Texas will accept the joint resolution of annexation are eased when the congress of the Lone Star Republic gives its approval. Yet clouds of potential trouble with Mexico loom low on the horizon as the two countries drift toward confrontation. The new president appears determined from the start to adopt the Texas viewpoint in the struggle ahead.

Florida becomes the 27th (slave) state.

Texas becomes the 28th (slave) state.

The Knickerbocker Baseball Club codifies the rules of baseball.

The U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland is opened.

The Blumer Brewery (now the Joseph Huber Brewing Company) is founded. Since 1845, there has been a brewery in Monroe, Wisconsin producing flavorful brews with a European character for the fertile Wisconsin land.

Edgar Allen Poe has his third volume of poems, The Raven and Other Poems, published in 1845.

The telegraph key Samuel Morse used on his first line in 1844 was very simple--a strip of spring steel that could be pressed against a metal contact. Alfred Vail, Morse's partner, designed this key, in which the gap was more easily adjustable because of changes in its spring tension. It was used on the expanding telegraph system, perhaps as early as the fall of 1844 and certainly by 1845.

Frederick Douglass (1818-45): Abolitionist orator who came into prominence between 1839 and 1845. In a Baltimore urban setting, Douglass became literate and by accident discovered Caleb Bingham's Columbian Orator, a prescriptive book on public speaking. Literacy allowed Douglass to appreciate Bingham's advice while the Columbian Orator formally introduced Douglass to the rules of oratory, supplied him with the words to meet proslavery arguments, and inspired him to master the art of oratory as a way to further the cause of liberty". Douglass also embraced Christianity during his years in Baltimore, which gave him opportunities to practice his public speaking skills in religious settings, while simultaneously giving his oratory a strong moral emphasis. He gained even further experience in public speaking after his escape from slavery, both as a lay preacher for the A.M.E. Zion Church and as an antislavery activist in the black community of New Bedford, Massachusetts.

In 1845, a group of leading members and their hazan left Congregation B'nai Jeshurun to form Shaaray Tefila, when a dissenting faction of young anti-establishment members seized B'nai Jeshurun by force. Founded as a strictly Orthodox congregation, Shaaray Tefila was led by the Dutch-born Samuel Myer Isaacs (1804-1878), one of only two English-speaking rabbis in the United States at the time and a firm adherent of normative Judaism. In 1857, Rabbi Isaacs launched the Jewish Messenger, which he made an effective organ for Orthodoxy in the wider Jewish community.

Queen Victoria (1819 - 1901), Queen of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, Empress of India and the British Empire: She was the daughter of Edward, the Duke of Kent and Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg and was born in Kensington Palace in London on May 24th, 1819. Edward died when Victoria was but eight months old, upon which her mother enacted a strict regimen that shunned the courts of Victoria's uncles, George IV and William IV.

In 1837 Queen Victoria took the throne after the death of her uncle William IV. Due to her secluded childhood, she displayed a personality marked by strong prejudices and a willful stubbornness.

Barely eighteen, she refused any further influence from her domineering mother and ruled in her own stead. Popular respect for the Crown was at a low point at her coronation, but the modest and straightforward young Queen won the hearts of her subjects. She wished to be informed of political matters, although she had no direct input in policy decisions. The Reform Act of 1832 had set the standard of legislative authority residing in the House of Lords, with executive authority resting within a cabinet formed of members of the House of Commons; the monarch was essentially removed from the loop. She respected and worked well with Lord Melbourne (Prime Minister in the early years of her reign) and England grew both socially and economically.

In 1837 Queen Victoria took the throne after the death of her uncle William IV. Due to her secluded childhood, she displayed a personality marked by strong prejudices and a willful stubbornness.

Barely eighteen, she refused any further influence from her domineering mother and ruled in her own stead. Popular respect for the Crown was at a low point at her coronation, but the modest and straightforward young Queen won the hearts of her subjects. She wished to be informed of political matters, although she had no direct input in policy decisions. The Reform Act of 1832 had set the standard of legislative authority residing in the House of Lords, with executive authority resting within a cabinet formed of members of the House of Commons; the monarch was essentially removed from the loop. She respected and worked well with Lord Melbourne (Prime Minister in the early years of her reign) and England grew both socially and economically.

On Feb 10th, 1840, only three years after taking the throne, Victoria took her first vow and married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Their relationship was one of great love and admiration. Together they bore nine children - four sons and five daughters: Victoria, Bertie, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, and Beatrice.

Prince Albert replaced Melbourne as the dominant male influence in Victoria's life. She was thoroughly devoted to him, and completely submitted to his will. Victoria did nothing without her husband's approval. Albert assisted in her royal duties. He introduced a strict decorum in court and made a point of straitlaced behavior. Albert also gave a more conservative tinge to Victoria's politics. If Victoria was to insistently interject her opinions and make her views felt in the cabinet, it was only because of Albert's teachings of hard work.

The general public, however, was not enamored with the German prince; he was excluded from holding any official political position, was never granted a title of peerage and was named Prince Consort only after seventeen years of marriage.. His interests in art, science, and industry spurred him to organize the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851, a highly profitable industrial convention. He used the proceeds, some £186,000, to purchase lands in Kensington for the establishment of several cultural and industrial museums.

Reflecting back into her childhood, Victoria was always prone to self pity. On Dec. 14th 1861 Albert died from typhoid fever at Windsor Castle. Victoria remained in self-imposed seclusion for ten years. This genuine, but obsessive mourning kept her occupied for the rest of her life and played an important role in the evolution of what would become the Victorian mentality.

Her popularity was at its lowest by 1870, but it steadily increased thereafter until her death. In 1876 she was crowned Empress of India by Disraeli. In 1887 Victoria's Golden Jubilee was a grand national celebration of her 50th year as Queen. The Golden Jubilee brought her out of her shell, and she once again embraced public life. She toured English possessions and even visited France (the first English monarch to do so since the coronation of Henry VI in 1431).

Victoria's long reign witnessed an evolution in English politics and the expansion of the British Empire, as well as political and social reforms on the continent. France had known two dynasties and embraced Republicanism, Spain had seen three monarchs and both Italy and Germany had united their separate principalities into national coalitions. Even in her dotage, she maintained a youthful energy and optimism that infected the English population as a whole. The national pride connected with the name of Victoria - the term Victorian England, for example, stemmed from the Queen's ethics and personal tastes, which generally reflected those of the middle class.

Irish Famine, 1845-50: It began with a blight of the potato crop that left acre upon acre of Irish farmland covered with black rot. As harvests across Europe failed, the price of food soared. Subsistence-level Irish farmers found their food stores rotting in their cellars, the crops they relied on to pay the rent to their British and Protestant landlords destroyed. Peasants who ate the rotten produce sickened and entire villages were consumed with cholera and typhus. Parish priests desperate to provide for their congregations were forced to forsake buying coffins in order to feed starving families, with the dead going unburied or buried only in the clothes they wore when they died. Landlords evicted hundreds of thousands of peasants, who then crowded into disease-infested workhouses. Other landlords paid for their tenants to emigrate, sending hundreds of thousands of Irish to America and other English-speaking countries. But even emigration was no panacea -- shipowners often crowded hundreds of desperate Irish onto rickety vessels labeled "coffin ships." In many cases, these ships reached port only after losing a third of their passengers to disease, hunger and other causes. While Britian provided much relief for Ireland's starving populace, many Irish criticized Britain's delayed response -- and further blamed centuries of British political oppression on the underlying causes of the famine. The Irish Famine of 1845-50 took as many as one million lives from hunger and disease, and changed the social and cultural structure of Ireland in profound ways. The Famine also spurred new waves of immigration, thus shaping the histories of the United States and Britain as well.

The combined forces of famine, disease and emigration depopulated the island; Ireland's population dropped from 8 million before the Famine to 5 million years after. If Irish nationalism was dormant for the first half of the nineteenth-century, the Famine convinced Irish citizens and Irish-Americans of the urgent need for political change. The Famine also changed centuries-old agricultural practices, hastening the end of the division of family estates into tiny lots capable of sustaining life only with a potato crop.

The potato blight of 1845 and the famine that followed from 1846 to 1852 appeared to English Liberals as a God-given opportunity to teach the Irish the value of English middle-class morality and learning. The efforts of English and Scotch scientists and agriculturalists to tutor the Irish peasants in methods of facing the crisis were hailed by the Times, which noted with relish the inability of O'Connell and other Irish leaders to fend off the impending disaster. Indeed, in the first stages of the potato blight many English men and women believed that the famine would be a perfect occasion to divorce the Irish from the Repeal movement. The Times encouraged this by arguing that O'Connell's continued collection of the Repeal rent showed that he "did not care" about his people, and should therefore be abandoned by the peasantry in favor of John Bull. Fired with confidence in the abilities of the enlightened middle class to provide for Ireland in time of dearth, most English shared Sir James Graham's confidence that Ireland itself is softened in all its parts by their [sic] sudden calamity; and capable of receiving new permanent impressions, if a master-hand can be found to direct them. The failure of free trade and middle-class science to prevent starvation, however, worked to destroy this confidence. It became all too easy for the English to blame the Irish for Ireland's miseries rather than to question the middle-class ideals in which the English had placed such faith. The reluctance of the traditionally-minded peasantry to accept the often bizarre advice of English scientists gave the latter an excuse to exculpate themselves and blame the peasants for the progress of blight and dearth. Robert Traile was one of these agriculturalists who visited Ireland with grandiose plans to teach the peasantry to ventilate their potato pits, which he was convinced would save the country from famine. His frustration at his failure to do so was vented on the peasantry, as in the following message to Peel: "I found the miserable apathy, the unmanageable doggedness, of the people, who would not move a hand, but folded their arms to wait, in listlessness & torpid stupidity, the ruin of the food of themselves & their families".

As the distress deepened and Irish appeals for help multiplied, the mood of the ministers became more pessimistic but still determined: "We shall succeed in the end. It will not be for many a long month, or many a long year perhaps that we shall get the people in that country to do their duty decently"

More and more, however, the Irish began to seem a threat to English prosperity, particularly as the dearth spread to Europe and England suffered from financial panics driven by railway speculation. Irish despair at the blight and famine increasingly appeared to the English as a parasitical desire to live off the wealth of their neighbors, with the inevitable result that England and Scotland would have to feed the whole of the Irish population. In the mind of the Whig Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Charles Wood, this was the product of "the universal disposition to do as little for themselves, & to throw as much upon the Government as possible." By 1848 Lord Clarendon, the Whig Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was like many of his countrymen fuming that "it is difficult to know how to deal with such a perverse people."

The Glasgow Academy in the west of Scotland was founded.

Queen's College, Cork was founded under the provisions of the Act 8 and 9 Victoria, cap. 66, instituted An Act to enable Her Majesty to endow new Colleges for the Advancement of Learning in Ireland. Under the powers given by this act the three Colleges of Belfast, Cork and Galway were incorporated on the 30th day of December, 1845. The statutes were drawn up, and the system of education to be pursued in them was arranged, by a board called the Board of Queen's Colleges, consisting of the Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the three colleges. The professors were appointed on 4th August, 1849, and on 30th October of the same year the colleges were opened for the reception of students.

Lord Rosse spent over three years building "The Leviathan of Parsonstown", a large telescope based around a 72 inch (183 cm) mirror, with which he hoped to confirm that some of the nebulae contain stars, hints of this being given by the 36 inch telescope. This telescope was basically a 17 m tube, suspended between two 15 m high walls, with a network of supports which enabled the tube to be moved freely in a vertical direction, but restricted horizontal movement to the extent that the total viewing time on any particular object varied from about 50 minutes for an object at the equator to about 2 hours for an object at the highest level. The vertical movement was contained between the lowest level of 15 degrees elevation and the highest level of 15 degrees beyond the vertical, i.e. a total vertical travel of 90 degrees. Again the mirror was cast in the grounds of the Castle, using 3 large crucibles and resulting in a mirror that weighed over 3 tons. Construction of the telescope and mountings took over 2 years but finally, on 15 February 1845, the weather cleared long enough for a short viewing of the double star Castor, which confirmed the potential of the new telescope. In April 1845, Lord Rosse was able to deduce the spiral nature of the M51 nebulae.

Georg Cantor (1845-1918): German mathematician who built a hierarchy of infinite sets according to their cardinal number. By one-to-one pairing, he showed that the set of real numbers has a higher cardinal number than does the set of rational fractions. However, he found every class of algebraic numbers has the same cardinal number as the integers. Such considerations led to his Mengenlehre (theory of assemblages) and Manningfaltigkeitslehre (theory of manifolds). He also invented the Cantor set.

Ludwig II of Bavaria was born on 25 August 1845, heir to the illustrious Wittelsbach family which at that time ruled Bavaria from its capital, Munich. Ludwig's mother, Marie, was the niece of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia. His father, Maximilian II, became king of Bavaria when Ludwig was two years old-Maximilian's own father, Ludwig I, had been forced to abdicate due to his involvement with a notorious Irish beauty who styled herself  Lola Montez.

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