Today in History November 19

1095 – At the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II calls for a Crusade to the Holy Land.

1493 – Christopher Columbus goes ashore on an island called Borinquen he first saw the day before. He names it San Juan Bautista (later renamed again Puerto Rico).
1863 – American Civil War: President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
1881 – A meteorite lands near the village of Grossliebenthal, southwest of Odessa, Ukraine.
1942 – World War II: Battle of Stalingrad: Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR’s favor.
1946 – Afghanistan, Iceland and Sweden join the United Nations.
1950 – General Dwight D. Eisenhower becomes Supreme Commander of NATO-Europe.
1959 – The Ford Motor Company announces the discontinuation of the unpopular Edsel.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Beanland at Oceanus Procellarum (the “Ocean of Storms“) and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
1985 – Cold War: In Geneva, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev meet for the first time.
1998 – Clinton-Lewinsky scandal: The United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton.
1998 – Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of the Artist Without Beard sells at auction for US$71.5 million.
2013 – A double suicide bombing at the Iranian embassy in Beirut kills 23 people and injures 160 others.
Births
1600 – Charles I of England (d. 1649)
1831 – James A. Garfield, 20th President of the United States (d. 1881)

Oil painting of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder (1875), made from his own 1825 watercolour portrait

1895 – Louise Dahl-Wolfe, American photographer (d. 1989)
1905 – Tommy Dorsey, American trombonist, composer and bandleader (The California Ramblers) (d. 1956)
1921 – Roy Campanella, American baseball player and coach (d. 1993)
1926 – Jeane Kirkpatrick, American academic and diplomat, 16th United States Ambassador to the United Nations (d. 2006)
1933 – Larry King, American journalist and talk show host
1935 – Jack Welch, American engineer, businessman, and author
1936 – Dick Cavett, American actor and talk show host
1938 – Ted Turner, American businessman and philanthropist, founded Turner Broadcasting System
1939 – Emil Constantinescu, 3rd President of Romania
1942 – Calvin Klein, American fashion designer
Deaths
1577 – Matsunaga Hisahide, Japanese daimyō (b. 1510)
1581 – Tsarevich Ivan Ivanovich of Russia (b. 1554)
1828 – Franz Schubert, Austrian pianist and composer (b. 1797)
1850 – Richard Mentor Johnson, American colonel, lawyer, and politician, 9th Vice President of the United States (b. 1780)
1883 – Carl Wilhelm Siemens, German-English engineer (b. 1823)
1887 – Emma Lazarus, American poet (b. 1849)
1915 – Joe Hill, Swedish-born American labor activist (b. 1879)

Listen to Joan Baez sing “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill”
1975 – Francisco Franco, Spanish dictator (b. 1892)
2014 – Mike Nichols, German-American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1931)
2017 – Charles Manson, American cult leader and mass murderer (b. 1934)