Today in history

On Nov. 19, 1997, Iowa seamstress Bobbi McCaughey (mihk- KOY’) gave birth to the world’s first set of surviving septuplets, four boys and three girls.

In 1794, the United States and Britain signed Jay’s Treaty, which resolved some issues left over from the Revolutionary War.

In 1831, the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield, was born in Orange Township, Ohio.

In 1850, Alfred Tennyson was invested as Britain’s poet laureate.

In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dedicated a national cemetery at the site of the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

In 1917, Indira Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru and, like her father, a future prime minister of India, was born in Allahabad.

In 1924, movie producer Thomas H. Ince died after celebrating his 42nd birthday aboard the yacht of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst. ( The exact circumstances of Ince’s death remain a mystery.)

In 1942, during World War II, Russian forces launched their winter offensive against the Germans along the Don front.

In 1959, Ford Motor Co. announced it was halting production of the unpopular Edsel.

In 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean made the second manned landing on the moon.

In 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat became the first Arab leader to visit Israel.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev met for the first time as they began their summit in Geneva.

In 2002, in a moment that drew criticism, singer Michael Jackson briefly held his youngest child, Prince Michael II (known as Blanket), over a fourth- floor balcony rail at a Berlin hotel in front of dozens of fans waiting below. (Jackson said he’d made a “terrible mistake.”)

Ten years ago: The FBI reported that hate crime incidents had risen nearly 8 percent in 2006. President George W. Bush announced that Fran Townsend, the leading White House-based terrorism adviser, was stepping down. Amazon. com released its first Kindle e-book reader. Milo Radulovich, the Air Force Reserve lieutenant championed by CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow when the military threatened to decommission him during the anti-communist crackdown of the 1950s, died in Vallejo (vuh-LAY’-oh), California, at age 81. Actor Dick Wilson, who played the fussy, mustachioed grocer who told customers, “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin,” died in Woodland Hills, California, at age 91.

“Make haste slowly.” — Caesar Augustus, Roman emperor (63 B.C.-A.D. 14).