United States in the 1990s

The 1990s in the United States are often characterized as a period of cultural stability, international peace, and financial success. The United States shrugged off a recession during the early part of the decade to post excellent economic growth rates from 1992–1999, adding an annual average of 1.7 million jobs to the US economy during each year of that run. Over the course of the decade, the US median household income grew by 10 percent, and the benchmark Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) climbed by more than 300 percent as an early technology boom ignited the nation’s stock markets. The Cold War (1947–1991) ended, stoking optimism for a new era of international security while violent crime rates across the United States fell sharply.

Yet at the same time, multiple high-profile events revealed increasing levels of alienation and radicalism within the US population. Domestic extremists carried out devastating terror attacks in Oklahoma City in 1995 and in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics, resulting in hundreds of injuries and fatalities. In 1999, two high school students perpetrated a shocking mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, prompting national conversations on gun control and the toxicity of youth culture. The specter of systemic racism also reappeared following the brutal beating of motorist Rodney King (1965–2012) in Los Angeles in 1991, later leading to widespread rioting when the police officers involved were acquitted of wrongdoing.

Apart from the brief Gulf War (1990–1991) and interventions aimed at restoring peace and stability to war-torn Somalia and the splintered former Yugoslavia, the United States largely avoided overseas military entanglements during the 1990s. However, 1993 bombing at New York City’s World Trade Center—largely interpreted as an isolated incident at the time—foreshadowed the world-changing events of September 11, 2001.

These happenings have generally prompted commentators to opine that while all seemed well on the surface of US society during the 1990s, dark and troubling shadows lurked below. Some analysts have described the 1990s as a kind of “golden age” of political liberalism, both in the United States and in many other Western democracies. The 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union gave the United States and its allies a clear victory in the Cold War, providing an unambiguous answer to the defining twentieth-century ideological question that pitted democratic capitalism against authoritarian communism. Yet in evaluating the impact of the 1990s from a twenty-first century perspective, other observers identify the decade as the origin of an ongoing decline in the defining values of liberal governance, which in their estimation has led directly to the hyperpolarized malaise that came to define the nation’s political landscape in the mid-to-late 2010s and early 2020s.

Society

The presidency of George H.W. Bush (1924–2018) marked a transitional phase between Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) and Bill Clinton (1946– ). Bush’s 1989–1993 term in office was largely defined by his continuation of many Reagan-era policies. Bush had served as Reagan’s vice-president throughout the latter’s 1981–1989 administration. Bush also led the country into the contentious Gulf War and occupied the White House during the early 1990s recession following the October 1987 stock market crash. Political analysts commonly describe Clinton’s 1992 ascendance to the presidency as being rooted in voter fatigue with the Republican leadership of the Reagan-Bush era, on which independent candidate Ross Perot (1930–2019) also attempted to capitalize.

Clinton’s administration sought to integrate the United States as much as possible into the international push toward globalism. In general, Clinton’s approach has been described as a consensus-building effort between the United States and its international partners in the democratic world, which prioritized economic and cultural prowess ahead of military might. Clinton’s presidential efforts were somewhat undermined by his extramarital dalliances with young White House intern Monica Lewinsky (1973– ), for which he was unsuccessfully impeached in 1998–1999. However, relative to the Watergate scandal of the 1970s and the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, Clinton’s indiscretions are often characterized as relatively mild and broadly emblematic of the decade’s comparatively tame and stable domestic political landscape.

Race relations, which had generally improved because of the economically successful 1980s, regressed in the early 1990s when the unjustified beating of the unarmed King, which was captured on video by an uninvolved citizen, became a major national news story. King, who had been involved in a high-speed freeway chase immediately prior to the incident, was brutalized by four Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers following a traffic stop. All four officers were later acquitted on charges related to the incident, sparking violent riots that rocked Los Angeles in the spring of 1992. The infamous murder prosecution of former professional football star O.J. Simpson (1947– ), which ended in October 1995 with a not-guilty verdict, also had a racialized component. The widely watched trial, which became a media sensation, divided white and Black Americans, who tended to interpret the same set of events in starkly divergent ways. At the time, most white Americans believed Simpson was guilty of the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson (1959–1994) and her friend Ronald Goldman (1968–1994), while most Black Americans believed the opposite and instead contended that Simpson had been framed by racist investigators.

In 1993, approximately 80 agents representing the federal Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agency carried out a raid on the compound occupied by a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh (1959–1993). The raid, commonly known as the Waco siege, took place in the outskirts of Waco, Texas, and ended a fifty-one-day standoff between government agents and the Branch Davidians that began when ATF agents came under heavy fire while attempting to execute a weapons-related search warrant. A fire engulfed the compound as the ATF conducted its final raid, killing seventy-six Branch Davidian cult members including Koresh. Many observers were critical of the US government’s actions in the incident, believing the tragedy was avoidable and the direct result of authoritarian overreach. Timothy McVeigh (1968–2001) was among those watching the siege unfold from a nearby hilltop, and its catastrophic results galvanized his percolating antigovernment sentiment. This drastic level of antigovernment fanaticism motivated McVeigh’s 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, including many children.

McVeigh’s act of domestic terrorism—the deadliest in US history—exposed increasing radicalization among extreme factions of the US far-right political spectrum. Similar motivations inspired Eric Rudolph (1966– ), who carried bomb attacks at Atlanta Olympic Park and other locations in the southern United States between 1996 and 1998. Following his 2003 capture, Rudolph stated that he perpetrated the 1996 Atlanta bombing to humiliate the United States before a global audience as retribution for the country’s liberalized stance on abortion.

Between these high-profile bombings and the 1999 tragedy at Columbine High School, the United States began to grapple with the grim realities of the disillusionment underlying its liberalism, affluence, and prosperity. The Columbine incident, which took place on April 20, 1999, saw students Dylan Klebold (1981–1999) and Eric Harris (1981–1999) kill thirteen fellow students before taking their own lives. It punctuated a decade marked by a largely unacknowledged tension between the shiny surface of the United States in the emerging Internet age and a troubled underside riddled with disaffection and anxiety as the turn of the millennium approached.

Science and Technology

The defining technological advancement of the 1990s was the widespread adoption of the Internet. According to estimates published by the University of Oxford project Our World in Data, approximately half of the US population was using the Internet as a source of information by the end of the 1990s. These rapidly rising adoption rates marked massive growth compared to the negligible number of US residents who were engaged with early Internet technologies at the decade’s outset.

Multiple factors combined to create the catalyst for the explosion of the Internet during the 1990s. These included major advancements in the usability of web-browsing software, which made it possible to view text and images online without the need to download them, along with improvements in the ability of telecommunications infrastructure to relay data across networks with accelerated efficiency. Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and especially the much-anticipated Windows 95 system released in August 1995, also made personal computers and the Internet more intuitive and usable on a mass scale. As a consequence, computing made rapid inroads in both the personal and enterprise markets. The Internet transformation had begun and was commonly characterized as the most impactful and important technological development since the invention of the printing press centuries earlier. Google was founded in Menlo Park, California, in September 1998 as the Internet became firmly entrenched in mainstream. The company would later go on to achieve a dominant position in the US technology industry on the strength of its proprietary Internet search tool.

The 1990s also witnessed a global boom in mobile telecommunications technology. According to an October 1999 report published by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the number of mobile communications subscribers increased from about eleven million globally in 1990 to more than three hundred million by the end of 1998. Technologies including pagers and cellular telephones were leading drivers of the trend. Pagers allowed users to receive notifications and messages while away from their home telephone and answering machine, while cellular telephones used radio technologies to facilitate voice-to-voice communication without requiring a conventional telephone line.

By the mid-1990s, US doctors had begun to treat HIV infections and more advanced cases of AIDS with multiple new classes of effective antiviral drugs including protease inhibitors and non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NNRTIs). Known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), these interventions coincided with significant improvements in the prognosis of HIV/AIDS patients and helped bring the HIV/AIDS epidemic under better control.

Other notable pharmaceutical developments of the 1990s include the increased use of stimulants such as methylphenidate, popularly known by the brand name Ritalin, as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). In 1994, Purdue Pharma began investigating a time-released formulation of the painkiller oxycodone as a potential treatment for chronic pain, leading to a strong uptick in prescriptions by 1996. Though the drugmaker’s formulation was initially viewed as a miracle cure for pain, the resultant medication—marketed as OxyContin—is now considered the root cause of an epidemic of opioid abuse that has persisted into the 2020s. Sildenafil, another product marketed as a breakthrough drug under the brand name Viagra, became available as a prescription treatment for male erectile dysfunction in 1998.

In 1990, the US federal government launched the Human Genome Project, an ambitious initiative in the fast-evolving field of genetics with the objective of mapping the entire human genome, which describes the totality of all genetic information contained within the human body. Working systematically and spurred by private-sector competition, the Human Genome Project reached its objective about a decade later when it released a preliminary version of the human genome map.

The “smart pill,” invented in 1992, combined innovations in pharmacology and engineering to deliver medications to highly specific, targeted sites in the human gastrointestinal tract. It was later adapted to include diagnostic imaging technologies, marking an important breakthrough in the use of miniature robotics in medicine.

In 1994, a research team that included University of California, Berkeley paleoanthropologist Tim D. White (1950– ) uncovered the fossilized remains of an early human ancestor in Ethiopia. The specimen was later dated to an approximate age of 4.4 million years, making it the oldest hominid ancestor of modern humans ever discovered. The find was initially classified within the Australopithecus ramidus genus—the same class to which the famous Lucy, discovered in 1974, belongs—before experts revised the classification to Ardipithecus ramidus less than a year later.

Economic and Cultural Trends

Early 1990s Recession, Economic Recovery, and the Dot-Com Boom

In 1990–1991, the US economy experienced a recession that approximately correlated with the country’s involvement in the Gulf War. It ultimately proved to be the only major economic hiccup of the decade, which was otherwise defined by a sustained period of strong growth that brought record highs in household income and home ownership.

A 2015 review published by the New York Times explored the strength of the 1990s economy by comparing it to US economic performance from 2000 to 2015. It noted that during the 1990–1999 period, median household income in the United States rose by 10 percent. Those gains were effectively wiped out between 2000 and 2015, when median household income declined by 9 percent. The US unemployment rate dropped from 8 percent to 4 percent between 1992 and 2000, while the nation’s average economic growth rate of 4 percent from 1992 to 1999 was not equaled during any year from 2000 to 2015.

Economists generally attribute the country’s strong economic performance during the 1990s to improved productivity, the positive impact of the Internet and other emerging technologies, the dominant US position in the fast-evolving globalist paradigm, sound central management of federal fiscal policy, and the benefits of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The so-called dot-com boom, which began in the mid-1990s with the emergence of popularized Internet technology, also fueled a wave of speculative stock market investment in technology companies that propelled US indexes to stunning highs. However, the dot-com boom ultimately proved to be a bubble, which burst in the early 2000s and sent the tech-heavy Nasdaq index plummeting to lows from which it would not recover until 2015.

Media and Popular Culture

Observers generally characterize the 1990s as a rich period of popular culture broadly marked by innovative challenges to established conventions. In the television landscape, these trends were captured by popular comedies including the animated satire series The Simpsons and the live-action sitcom Seinfeld, famously branded as “a show about nothing.” The series finale of Cheers, a popular sitcom more readily identified with the 1980s, was the most-watched television episode of the 1990s, attracting 42.36 million US viewers when it aired in 1993. Friends, a lifestyle sitcom that followed a group of trendy young adults living in New York City, also ranked among the decade’s most popular TV shows.

Crossover acts combining hard rock with rap and hip-hop became trendy during the early 1990s, while the decade’s music and motion picture industries were both heavily defined by the popularization of independent artists championing styles and modes of expression previously relegated to underground circles. In music, these trends were most memorably defined by the rapid rise of a genre known as alternative rock, pioneered by a collection of emerging bands from the Pacific Northwest led by Nirvana, whose 1991 album Nevermind is often cited as defining mainstream youth culture and fashion during the early part of the decade. In film, it was best captured by the 1994 motion picture Pulp Fiction, which was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino (1963– ). The Academy Award-winning film became a cultural phenomenon and one of the most talked-about movies in decades.

The April 1994 suicide of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) marked a pivotal point in 1990s popular music, with many commentators retrospectively characterizing it as the moment at which rock yielded its dominance to the ascendant genres of rap and hip-hop. By the end of the 1990s, rap and hip-hop were widely considered to have the most cultural relevance of any popular music genre, while rock went into an extended period of general decline.

During the 1990s, rave subculture also entered the mainstream from its origins in the underground dance scene of the 1980s. The subculture was defined by underground parties known as raves, which were typically held at secret locations, featured high-energy electronic dance music (EDM), and sometimes went on for days. Raves later became notorious for their widespread tolerance of hard drug use, including MDMA (ecstasy), amphetamines, and other stimulants. However, their participants, known as ravers, identified with a set of principles expressed by the acronym PLUR (peace, love, unity, and respect).

About the Author

Jim Greene is a freelance writer and Canadian expatriate currently based in the European Union. A graduate of the University of Guelph (BA, English), Toronto Metropolitan University (BFA, Film Studies), and the University of Southern California (MFA, Creative Writing), he has been writing professionally since 2001 through his owner-operated editorial services and consulting firm.

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