In what ways did Bill Clinton and the New Democrats transform their party and reshape the federal government?
How did different Americans experience and respond to economic globalization?
What was the digital revolution?
How did George W. Bush's administration respond to the 9/11 terrorist attacks?
What caused the Great Recession of 2007-2009?
In 1998, DNA testing confirmed that President Thomas Jefferson had fathered a son with Sally Hemings.
This led to controversy within the Jefferson family, reflecting ongoing reckoning with the nation's heritage and legacies of slavery.
Highlighted the revolutionary power of new technologies to challenge perceptions of reality.
free trade zone
Christian Coalition
supply-side economics
election of 1980
deregulation
make America great again
Reaganomics
savings and loan associations
temps
evil empire
Reagan Doctrine
Beirut barracks bombing
war on drugs
New Federalism
Iran-Contra scandal
automation
personal computer
Vietnam syndrome
affluence gap
homeless Americans
Generation X
sanctuary movement
Comprehensive Anti-apartheid Act
Rainbow Coalition
Reagan Democrats
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
culture wars
attack ads
Americans with Disabilities Act
third wave feminism
Operation Desert Storm
1992: Bill Clinton is elected president
1993: Mosaic web browser popularizes the World Wide Web. U.S., Canada, and Mexico sign NAFTA. Waco standoff ends. Al-Qaeda bomb under World Trade Center.
1994: Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act bans assault weapons.
1995: Anti-government militia bomb federal building in Oklahoma City. World Trade Organization founded.
1996: Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act cuts welfare benefits.
1998: Federal budget runs surplus for the first time since 1970.
1999: Police clash with anti-globalization protesters in Seattle. Joint U.S.-NATO force strikes Serbian military.
2000: Dot-com crash. Islamist radicals bomb USS Cole off Yemen coast. George W. Bush is elected president.
2001: Federal budget re-enters deficit. Al-Qaeda attacks World Trade Center and Pentagon. UN forces bomb al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan.
2003: U.S. and allies invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.
2004: Photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib go viral. Facebook goes online.
2005: Gay couple legally weds in Massachusetts. Hurricane Katrina ravages Gulf Coast.
2007: Great Recession begins as housing and stock markets crash.
2008: President Bush secures 700-billion-dollar federal bailout. Barack Obama is elected president.
Facilitated the flood of computers and the distribution of information.
Stimulated international collaboration among scientists and scholars.
Underwrote mass digitization of information and adoption of the Internet and cellular phones.
Reflected and reinforced patterns of deregulation and privatization.
Like the Industrial Revolution, economic globalization and the digital revolution proved creative yet destructive.
American manufacturers left the United States.
Financial, information, and other services revitalized many American cities in the 1990s.
The rapid expansion of the Internet promoted the exchange of information and cut business costs.
Immigration and outsourcing broke down barriers in the U.S. labor market but hastened the decline of older industries.
Americans were grappling with the complexities of globalization when terrorists struck on September 11, 2001.
The foreign wars that followed became the most talked-about issues of the day.
In 2008, the worst recession since the Great Depression threw millions of Americans out of home and work.
In 1991, most Americans associated prosperity with the Republicans.
Some Democrats believed that the party's New Deal liberalism was outmoded.
A younger generation of Democrats elected Bill Clinton to the presidency.
The Clinton administration set about promoting globalization, reshaping welfare, and deregulating business.
The president and the nation faced multiple challenges.
Gridlock set in when the Republicans won Congress in 1994.
Homegrown anti-government terrorist groups proliferated, and the United States became a target of Islamist radicals.
Democratic prospects in the 1992 presidential election seemed dim.
Many Americans credited Republican leadership with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Arkansas governor Bill Clinton sensed an opportunity in the spiraling federal deficit.
As a leading member of New Democrats, Clinton advocated centrist policies.
New Democrats combined liberal cultural policies with conservative economic positions.
New Democrats also took a conservative approach to criminal justice.
Clinton announced his candidacy in October 1991.
Clinton also insisted that the welfare system should promote self-responsibility.
Clinton consolidated support among Southern and Midwestern voters.
Republicans cast their lot with George H. W. Bush.
Many Republicans were drawn to H. Ross Perot, a Texas tech billionaire.
In an effort to mobilize conservatives, Bush tarred the Democratic nominee as a liberal.
Clinton deflected the attacks.
Clinton's speeches stayed focused on the economic issues.
Clinton carried the election.
Clinton entered office determined to change both government and the Democratic Party.
Clinton appointed more women and minorities to cabinet positions than any previous president.
Madeleine K. Albright served as the nation's first female secretary of state, and Janet Reno became the first female attorney general.
Clinton also appointed to the cabinet three Blacks and the first Asian American.
Clinton pushed through an increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-wage earners.
Clinton also scored a victory when Congress approved NAFTA in 1993.
Clinton's other top priority was eliminating the $4.4 trillion dollar budget deficit.
In his first four years, the president pushed through new taxes and steep spending cuts.
By the time Clinton left office in 2000, he had turned the national deficit into a surplus.
In the arena of women's rights, the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) authorized unpaid leave, while the Violence Against Women Act (1994) funded rape crisis centers.
Clinton's Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994) imposed the death penalty for crimes such as large-scale drug running.
However, health care reform failed miserably.
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton headed a campaign to make health care available to all working Americans.
Over 9.6 billion dollars flowed into new prison construction.
Another 8.8 billion dollars was spent on hiring one hundred thousand new police officers.
The law authorized the government to spend an unprecedented 30 billion dollars on criminal justice.
In November 1994, Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years.
Clinton and the New Democrats had achieved major spending cuts, but the Republican agenda went much further.
Gingrich's Contract with America promised to produce balanced budgets, low taxes, welfare reform, tort reform, and congressional term limits.
Republicans also sought to overturn gun control laws, expand prisons, roll back affirmative action, and cut both Social Security and Medicare.
The centerpiece of the "contract" was a constitutional amendment that would have required Congress and the president to balance the federal budget.
The constitutional amendment failed, but the Republicans passed other bills.
When President Clinton vetoed the proposed budget, House Republicans withheld emergency funding.
Although lawmakers blamed Clinton for the closures, most voters held Congress responsible.
The Republican leadership dropped its insistence on cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
President Clinton also softened his position, as he conceded in January 1996 that the "era of big government is over."
He signed the revised budget.
Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (1996).
Critically, the law also shifted to state government the power to make decisions concerning the distribution of many welfare benefits.
The impact on the poor was immediate.
Buoyed by the rebounding economy, Clinton easily won re-election in 1996.
The Republicans held on to majorities in the House and the Senate.
The next four years would be characterized by political deadlock and a White House scandal.
In 1994, Congress had appointed Kenneth Starr to investigate Bill and Hillary Clinton's involvement in Whitewater.
In 1998, Starr resolved to pursue rumors about the president and Monica Lewinsky.
After initially declaring that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman," the president eventually admitted that he had had "inappropriate intimate contact" with Lewinsky.
Starr wrote a report to Congress and recommended impeachment charges against the president.
Several prominent Democrats condemned Clinton's behavior.
Starr's report seemed destined to ensure Clinton's removal from office.
House Republicans voted to impeach Clinton.
Starr's efforts to remove Clinton ultimately stalled in the Senate.
Although Clinton was relatively popular, anti-government extremism mushroomed during his tenure.
Indeed, whereas violent crime decreased in the 1990s, domestic terrorism increased.
A minority of discontented citizens joined armed militias.
Convinced that the UN would take over the country, many began stockpiling weapons.
To these militias, the passage in 1993 of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act was proof of the coming crackdown.
Some took the words of Thomas Jefferson out of context.
In 1993, ATF agents learned that an armed religious cult in Waco, Texas, had been stockpiling weapons.
ATF agents swooped in on the Waco compound, sparking a gunfight.
After a tense, seven-week standoff, the attorney general ordered federal agents to clear the compound.
A conflagration erupted, claiming the lives of fifty adults and twenty-five children.
Extremist militias blamed the federal government.
On the two-year anniversary of the Waco siege, militia members used a massive fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
The Oklahoma City bombing had been plotted and carried out by Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier.
Nongovernmental entities were also subject to politically motivated violence.
Abortion clinics and their personnel became the targets of extreme anti-abortionists.
Mass shootings escalated despite the tough new gun control and crime prevention laws.
The 1990s saw twenty-three armed rampages.
In 1999, two heavily armed teens shot and killed twelve schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado.
Relatively few Americans were familiar with the term globalization at the beginning of President Clinton's first term.
By 2000, however, the majority understood the concept to mean free-flowing trade and investment among nations.
Globalization accelerated dramatically in the 1990s.
In the United States, NAFTA sped the process on a regional level.
Both George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton promoted globalization and supported NAFTA.
The most powerful champion of economic globalization was the World Trade Organization (WTO), which the United States and other advanced industrial nations jointly founded in 1995.
The new organization successfully negotiated the opening of formerly protected economies to large-scale investment and trade.
The WTO's vision of the post-Cold War world was essentially the same neoliberal vision that conservative economists had been promoting since the 1940s.
The goal was a single global market, freed from costly constraints.
WTO leaders worked closely with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and corporations.
The dissolution of trade and investment barriers proved a boon to U.S. corporations.
McDonald's multiplied its franchises worldwide.
The Walt Disney Company opened Euro Disney in Paris in 1992.
National economies, such as those of India and Vietnam, flourished.
As manufacturing shifted to the less developed world, the prices of consumer electronics dropped in the United States.
Economic globalization also compounded the inequality between the wealthiest elites and the world's poorest.
In many regions, it helped deliver natural resources into the hands of U.S. and European megacorporations.
Local elites often benefited from such deals.
In the United States, the auto industry moved their plants to other countries.
Battling industrial hubs, such as Detroit and Cleveland, lost more jobs.
*Garbage has long been a valuable resource.
*Cities' "night soil" (human waste) was sold to farmers for use as fertilizer.
*Until the introduction of sewers and toilets in the late nineteenth century.
*Environmentalism, the privatization of city sanitation services, and deregulation transformed trash into a billion-dollar-a-year industry.
*1987: The widely reported story of the Mobro 4000 trash barge awakened Americans to the fact that their society was producing far more trash than it could absorb.
*The EPA listed waste prevention and recycling as top priorities.
Three-quarters of the states passed recycling laws.
*The EPA's new standards for landfills closed hundreds of small landfill businesses.
*EPA standards for garbage trucks squeezed smaller operators out of business.
*Citizens learned to interpret recycling codes (numbered 1-7) on the bottom of plastics and separated paper from plastic, glass, and cans.
*Monetary value of garbage increased.
*recycling programs generated a constant supply of bottles, tin, paper, and plastic.
*1992: The Chicago Board of Trade opened the first Recyclables Exchange, in which millions of dollars of garbage are bought and sold daily.
*Thriving export trade emerged and by 2010, scrap and trash had become the nation's top export.
Globalization's side effects faced mounting criticism in the mid-1990s.
Some critics opposed economic globalization outright.
French farmer José Bovée declared, "The world is not for sale!"
In Chiapas, Mexico, peasants formed the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
In the United States, most critics called not for an end to globalization but for a different kind of globalization.
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros condemned what he called the reigning "market fundamentalism."
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz added that current policies gave big business a free hand.
Both men called for regulation and a more transparent system of decision making.
Upwards of forty thousand Americans reinforced such criticisms when they converged on the Seattle meeting of the WTO in November 1999.
Smaller, more radical groups vandalized symbols of global corporate capitalism.
Overwhelmed by the crowd's size, police began teargasing and beating protesters.
This "Battle of Seattle" delayed the start of the WTO sessions.
Beyond the spheres of international trade and investment, the U.S. role in the post-Cold War world remained uncertain at the start of Clinton's presidency.
Like Jimmy Carter, Clinton envisioned the United States as a protector of human rights.
Balancing these aspirations against other U.S. interests, however, proved challenging.
In 1992, President George H. W. Bush had dispatched U.S. troops to Somalia.
Tribal warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid killed fifty UN peacekeepers in 1993.
President Clinton immediately deployed marines against Aidid.
The United States withdrew from Somalia soon after.
Within months, another human rights crisis erupted in ethnically divided Rwanda.
In 1994, the majority Hutu population rose up against the nation's Tutsi minority.
Although the United Nations had a peacekeeping force in Rwanda, the United States was reluctant to participate directly.
President Clinton opted not to commit U.S. forces.
Revelations of the Rwandan genocide persuaded Clinton to intervene in another ethic conflict, this time in Europe.
In ethnically diverse Bosnia, the Orthodox Christian Serb population relentlessly attacked Muslim citizens.
Clinton authorized air strikes against the Serbs.
Clinton again ordered U.S.-NATO air strikes against the Serbs.
Peacemaking was high on Clinton's foreign policy agenda.
The president traveled to Ireland to broker a settlement between Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Progress was also made in the Middle East in 1993, when Clinton orchestrated a historic meeting between Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
*During the 1980s, new strains of extremism had emerged in Afghanistan, where Muslim fighters had fought a war to repel the Soviet invasion
*Young Muslim men flocked to Afghanistan to join the fight.
*Once the Soviets withdrew in 1989 and the Taliban formed a government, many Saudi Arabian fighters returned home.
*When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden offered the Saudi government the use of his fighters to protect the nation's oil fields.
*The Saudi government rejected the offer and instead provided facilities for the U.S. forces.
*Enraged that the Saudis had invited non-Muslim forces onto their soil, al-Qaeda plotted revenge against the United States.
*Al-Qaeda's network expanded in the 1990s to include radical Islamist operatives.
*Overseas, terrorists targeted Americans as well.
*The most daring attack came in 2000 in Yemen, where a small, bomb-carrying boat exploded, and seventeen U.S. servicemembers died.
*The few Americans who had heard of al-Qaeda in 2000 tended to think of the organization as nothing more than a motley crew of religious fanatics.
*Far from being old-fashioned, al-Qaeda was using global networks to recruit followers and wage war.
The Internet spread like wildfire across the nation and the world in the 1990s.
By mid-decade, tens of millions were going online each day.
The Internet sped the emergence of a postindustrial economy.
At the same time, breakthroughs in medical and biological science remade the conventional understanding of life.
Technological innovation and demographic mobility were breaking down boundaries.
Digitization was not a new technology in the 1990s.
Computers dated back to the 1950s.
In the 1990s, computing and electronic manufacturers used digitization to transform work, leisure, and social relations.
Two new kinds of digital networks began changing everyday life in the 1990s: cellular phone service and the Internet.
Between 1992 and 2000, the number of cell phone subscribers increased tenfold.