Today in History....November 19

* 1493, Christopher Columbus goes ashore on an island he first saw the day before. He names it San Juan Bautista (later renamed Puerto Rico)

* 1794, the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain sign Jay's Treaty, which attempts to clear up some of the lingering problems left over from the American Revolutionary War

* 1863, President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address as he dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield in Pennsylvania

* 1919, the Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles by a vote of 55-39, short of the two-thirds majority needed for ratification

* 1944, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt announces the 6th War Loan Drive, aimed at selling $14 billion in war bonds to help pay for the war effort

* 1959, Ford Motor Company announces the discontinuation of the unpopular Edsel

* 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum ("Ocean of Storms") and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon

* 1970, the IBM 1620, marketed as an inexpensive "scientific computer", is withdrawn from the market after a total production of about two thousand units. Modified versions of the 1620 were used as the CPU of the IBM 1710 and IBM 1720 Industrial Process Control Systems (making it the first digital computer considered reliable enough for real-time process control of factory equipment)

* 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement

* 1979, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders the release of
13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran

* 1985, in Geneva, US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time. ALSO: Pennzoil wins a $10.53 billion verdict against Texaco, in the largest civil verdict in U.S.
history, stemming from Texaco's establishing a signed contract to buy Getty Oil after Pennzoil had entered into an unsigned, yet still binding, buyout contract with Getty

* 1990, pop group Milli Vanilli are stripped of their Grammy Award because the duo did not sing at all on the "Girl You Know It’s True"
album. Session musicians had provided all the vocals

* 1997, in Des Moines, Iowa, Bobbi McCaughey gives birth to septuplets in the second known case where all seven babies were born alive. They would go on to become the first set of septuplets to survive infancy, with all seven alive in 2007

* 1998, the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings against US President Bill Clinton