Portal:1990s

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 1990s Portal

From top left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope orbits the Earth after it was launched in 1990; American jets fly over burning oil fields in the 1991 Gulf War; the Oslo Accords on 13 September 1993; the World Wide Web gains massive popularity worldwide; Boris Yeltsin greets crowds after the failed August Coup, which leads to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991; Dolly the sheep is the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell; the funeral procession of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a 1997 car crash, and was mourned by millions; hundreds of thousands of Tutsi people are killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994

The 1990s (pronounced "nineteen-nineties"; shortened to "the '90s") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 1990, and ended on 31 December 1999.

Culturally, the 1990s are characterized by the rise of multiculturalism and alternative media, which continues into the present day. Movements such as hip hop, the rave scene and grunge spread around the world to young people during that decade, aided by then-new technology such as cable television and the World Wide Web.

In the absence of world communism, which collapsed in the first two years of the decade, the 1990s was politically defined by a movement towards the right-wing, including increase in support for far-right parties in Europe[1] as well as the advent of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party[2] and cuts in social spending in the United States,[3] Canada,[4] New Zealand,[5] and the UK.[6] The United States also saw a massive revival in the use of the death penalty in the 1990s, which reversed in the early 21st century.[7] During the 1990s the character of the European Union and Euro were formed and codified in treaties.

A combination of factors, including the continued mass mobilization of capital markets through neo-liberalism, the thawing of the decades-long Cold War, the beginning of the widespread proliferation of new media such as the Internet from the middle of the decade onwards, increasing skepticism towards government, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to a realignment and reconsolidation of economic and political power across the world and within countries. The dot-com bubble of 1997–2000 brought wealth to some entrepreneurs before its crash between 2000 and 2001.

The 1990s saw extreme advances in technology, with the World Wide Web, the first gene therapy trial, and the first designer babies[8] all emerging in 1990 and being improved and built upon throughout the decade.

New ethnic conflicts emerged in Africa, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, the former two which led to the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, respectively. Signs of any resolution of tensions between Israel and the Arab world remained elusive despite the progress of the Oslo Accords, though The Troubles in Northern Ireland came to a standstill in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement after 30 years of violence.[9]

Germans stand on top of the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate in the days before the Wall was torn down.

German reunification (German: Deutsche Wiedervereinigung) was the process of re-establishing Germany as a single full sovereign state, which took place between 9 November 1989 and 15 March 1991. The "Unification Treaty" entered into force on 3 October 1990, dissolving the German Democratic Republic (GDR; German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, DDR, or East Germany) and integrating its recently re-established constituent federated states into the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, BRD, or West Germany) to form present-day Germany. This date has been chosen as the customary German Unity Day (Tag der deutschen Einheit), and has thereafter been celebrated each year as a national holiday in Germany since 1991. As part of the reunification, East and West Berlin of the two countries were also de facto united into a single city, which eventually became the capital of this country.

The East German government dominated by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) (a communist party) started to falter on 2 May 1989, when the removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria opened a hole in the Iron Curtain. The border was still closely guarded, but the Pan-European Picnic and the indecisive reaction of the rulers of the Eastern Bloc set in motion an irreversible movement. It allowed an exodus of thousands of East Germans fleeing to West Germany via Hungary. The Peaceful Revolution, a part of the international Revolutions of 1989 including a series of protests by the East German citizens, led to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and GDR's first free elections later on 18 March 1990 and then to the negotiations between the two countries that culminated in a Unification Treaty. Other negotiations between the two Germanies and the four occupying powers in Germany produced the so-called "Two Plus Four Treaty" (Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany), granting on 15 March 1991 full sovereignty to a reunified German state, whose two parts were previously bound by a number of limitations stemming from their post-World War II status as occupation zones, though only on 31 August 1994 did the last Russian occupation troops (Russia is the successor of the Soviet Union legally) leave Germany. (Full article...)
List of selected articles

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

Selected picture

Tanks near the Red Square in Moscow during the failed coup attempt. The USSR fell just 4 months later.

List articles

Category puzzle
Category puzzle
Select [►] to view subcategories

Selected biography - show another

Gingrich in 2022

Newton Leroy Gingrich (/ˈɡɪŋɡrɪ/; né McPherson; born June 17, 1943) is an American politician and author who served as the 50th speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. A member of the Republican Party, he was the U.S. representative for Georgia's 6th congressional district serving north Atlanta and nearby areas from 1979 until his resignation in 1999. In 2012, Gingrich unsuccessfully ran for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

In the 1970s, Gingrich was a professor of history and geography at the University of West Georgia. He won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in November 1978, the first Republican in the history of Georgia's 6th congressional district to do so. He served as House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995. A co-author and architect of the "Contract with America", Gingrich was a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. In 1995, Time named him "Man of the Year" for "his role in ending the four-decades-long Democratic majority in the House". (Full article...)

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various 1990s-related articles on Wikipedia.

1990s films - load new batch

These are Good articles, which meet a core set of high editorial standards.

Topics

Related portals

Categories

Wikiprojects

You are invited to participate in WikiProject Years, a WikiProject dedicated to developing and improving articles about years, decades, centuries, and millennia.

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Sources

  1. ^ Merkl, Peter; Leonard, Weinberg (2 August 2004). Right-wing Extremism in the Twenty-first Century. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-76421-0.
  2. ^ "India – The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rise of Hindu Nationalism".
  3. ^ ROSEN, RUTH (27 December 1994). "Which of Us Isn't Taking 'Welfare'? : Poor children rank low in government largess; why is the comfortable class so mean?". Los Angeles Times.
  4. ^ Séguin, Gilles. "Provincial Welfare Reforms in the 1990s – Canadian Social Research Links".
  5. ^ Maloney, Tim (1 May 2002). "Welfare Reform and Unemployment in New Zealand". Economica. 69 (274): 273–293. doi:10.1111/1468-0335.00283.
  6. ^ "Policy Exchange – Shaping the Policy Agenda" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 21 January 2014.
  7. ^ https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/12/19/report-us-executions-dipped-in-2013
  8. ^ Handyside, AH; Kontogianni, EH; Hardy, K; Winston, RM (1990). "Pregnancies from biopsied human preimplantation embryos sexed by Y-specific DNA amplification". Nature. 344 (6268): 768–70. Bibcode:1990Natur.344..768H. doi:10.1038/344768a0. PMID 2330030.
  9. ^ Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2004). The Roaring Nineties. W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-32618-5.
Discover Wikipedia using portals