The US in 1989-2000

What is American History B Online?

The 11th-grade level American History course podcast for BESD.

00:00 Introduction
When we left off, Ronald Reagan was standing at the Berlin Wall, challenging the Soviet leader to tear it down. Reagan finished his presidency and handed the baton to his vice president, George H. W. Bush.
And then, almost immediately, the world changed in ways that almost nobody predicted.
________________________________________
00:27 The Fall of Communism
Remember Mikhail Gorbachev? The Soviet leader Reagan had built that unlikely friendship with? Gorbachev knew the Soviet system was struggling. The economy was stagnant. People were restless. And so he introduced two big reform ideas.
The first was glasnost — a Russian word meaning openness. The idea was to loosen restrictions on speech and the press, let people criticize the government, and bring new ideas into public life.
The second was perestroika — meaning restructuring. This was about reforming the Soviet economy, making it less rigid, and introducing some capitalist principles.
Gorbachev thought he could open the windows just a little — let in some fresh air — and save the Soviet system. What he didn't anticipate is that once people get a taste of freedom, they tend to want more of it. A lot more.
Across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, people began demanding real freedoms. Not just slightly looser restrictions — actual liberty. Protests swept the region. And one by one, communist governments that had seemed unmovable began to fall. All the countries that the USSR had taken over after WWII – places like Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria - declared independence.
In 1991, hardline Communist officials who hated what Gorbachev was doing attempted a coup to remove him from power. It failed. But the chaos that followed only accelerated things. More soviet republics declared independence. The massive empire was coming apart at the seams.
On December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned. The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist.
The Cold War was over.
Now you may be wondering why we’re talking about Russia in an American history course. Here's why: from 1945 to 1991, nearly every major decision in American foreign policy — every alliance, every conflict, every presidential speech — was shaped by one driving force: stopping communism. It was the organizing principle of an entire era – the Cold War era. When communism collapsed, it didn't just change the world map. It changed America’s place in the world. What comes next, when the enemy you've been fighting for 46 years simply disappears?
That's a question the 1990s would spend a lot of time trying to answer. It’s a question we’re still trying to answer today.
________________________________________
03:11 The Persian Gulf War
The first part of that answer came quickly.
In August 1990, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered his army to invade the neighboring country of Kuwait.
A quick geography note here — Iraq and Iran are two different countries. We talked about Iran last time, with the hostage crisis. This is Iraq, a different country, a different government, a different conflict. They just both start with the same three letters an are in the same region.
Back to the story: Why did Saddam invade Kuwait? Partly territorial disputes and partly economics. Kuwait sat on enormous oil reserves.
President George H.W. Bush assembled a broad international coalition and went to the United Nations. The message was clear: this invasion would not stand. American and allied forces poured into the region.
Back home, not everyone was on board. Protesters took to the streets with a pointed slogan: "No blood for oil." Their argument was simple: the United States wasn't defending freedom. It was protecting its oil supply. It was a debate that echoed some of the same credibility questions raised during Vietnam. Other Americans saw the conflict as a classic case of a dictator oppressing people – a classic situation that called for American involvement.
But despite those arguments, the war itself was swift. Coalition forces drove Saddam's army out of Kuwait in a ground campaign that lasted just 100 hours. As Iraqi forces retreated, Saddam ordered his troops to set Kuwait's oil wells on fire — a scorched-earth act of spite that turned the sky black for months. Most of our soldiers spent more time capping oil wells than fighting Iraqis.
But if it’s so short, why does it matter? It matters because it was fast. Decisive. American forces went in, accomplished the mission, and came home.
That success planted a dangerous seed. A decade later, when the United States would face Saddam Hussein again — and when it would go to war in Afghanistan — many Americans assumed things would go the same way. Go in, win quickly, come home. America! Invincible! As we'll see in our next episode, that assumption was very, very wrong.
________________________________________
05:48 Bill Clinton and "The Economy, Stupid"
The Gulf War made George H.W. Bush enormously popular. His approval ratings after the war were astronomical.
And then the economy softened. And Americans, as we've established, are reliable about one thing: angry voters tend to vote for the other party.
In 1992, a young governor from Arkansas named Bill Clinton ran for president. His campaign team had a now-famous note pinned inside their headquarters to keep everyone focused. It read: "It's the economy, stupid."
It worked. Clinton won.
Clinton's presidency brought a booming economy — the longest peacetime economic expansion in American history up to that point. But it also brought two major stories we need to cover.
________________________________________
06:36 NAFTA and Globalization
The first is related to the economy. It involved a treaty named NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — signed in 1993.
The basic idea behind NAFTA was to eliminate trade barriers between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Free movement of goods across borders. The theory was that this would be good for all three economies.
NAFTA was part of a much larger global trend called globalization. Globalization is the growing economic connections between nations, especially through trade. The world was becoming one big marketplace. Things would be designed in California, mined in Bangladesh, assembled in China or Vietnam, and shipped to the United States.
Here's what NAFTA (and globalization) meant in practice: Goods were cheaper because they were made in economies with lower wages. And so it became cheaper for American companies to move their factories to Mexico. And many of them did exactly that.
This is where it gets personal for us. There's a furniture company you've probably heard of — La-Z-Boy. They had a factory in Tremonton, Utah – a city you may have heard of. [chuckle] That factory had good jobs. Workers earned steady wages.
But after NAFTA, La-Z-Boy moved that production to Mexico. The factory closed. The jobs left.
And the community felt it. People lost their jobs and Tremonton’s economy suffered greatly.
Now this is exactly why we study history — not just to know names and dates, but to understand the forces that shape the world we actually live in. Globalization is a good example. It’s not just an abstract concept; it's the reason a factory in one of our towns closed. Workers who understood history and government understood what was happening. They could prepare for it. But for those who chose to ignore these important subjects, it must have felt like being swept around by the ocean’s waves. This is one reason why we study history – so we understand what is happening to us, in the present.
Whether NAFTA was ultimately good or bad for America is genuinely debated. But what isn't debated is that real people in real communities — including ours — felt those consequences directly.
________________________________________
09:12 The Impeachment of Bill Clinton
Remember I said there were two stories in Clinton’s presidency. The next one involves scandal and impeachment.
But before moving forward, let's define impeachment, because the word gets thrown around a lot and people often misunderstand it. Impeachment is when the House of Representatives formally charges the president with misconduct and puts them on trial before the Senate. Impeachment itself doesn't remove a president. Conviction by the Senate does. Think of it like being charged with a crime. Being charged is not the same as being found guilty.
Now — what happened with Clinton?
Clinton had an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. When he was questioned about it under oath, he lied. Remember all the courthouse dramas you’ve seen, where they “swear to the tell the truth, the whole trust, and nothing but the truth?” Lying after promise is called perjury. And it’s a crime. In addition to perjury, Clinton was also accused of obstructing justice by encouraging others to cover it up.
Remember what we said about Watergate? It's not usually the action that sinks people — it's the cover-up. Nixon. Now Clinton. As a side note, he should have known better. A common saying states, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.” Clinton, perhaps, should have spent more time studying former presidents and less studying Miss Lewinsky.
The House of Representatives impeached Clinton in December 1998. He became only the second president in American history to be impeached. But when the trial moved to the Senate, they did not convict him. Clinton finished his term.
He was impeached. He was not removed. Both of those things are true.
________________________________________
11:12 The World Wide Web
One more thing happened in the 1990s that changed the fundamental ways people accessed information.
You probably know what the internet is. But the internet and the World Wide Web are actually not the same thing — and the distinction matters. The internet is the underlying network of connected computers. It had existed in various forms since the 1960s. But for most of its history, it was complicated, technical, and basically inaccessible to ordinary people.
The World Wide Web — invented by a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee — changed that. It created a system of websites and links that made the internet something anyone could navigate. You didn't need to be a computer scientist. You just needed an app called a browser. Suddenly, the internet was for everybody.
You know that little "www." at the beginning of a web address? That stands for World Wide Web. Hopefully that helps you remember.
The consequences were enormous. For the first time in human history, a person sitting at home could access vast amounts of information instantly. Libraries had always given people access to knowledge — but you had to go there, find the right book, and hope it was on the shelf. The Web democratized information in a way nothing ever had before.
But — and this is important — it also democratized misinformation. Anyone with basic internet access could publish anything. No editors. No fact-checkers. No gatekeepers. The same technology that made knowledge freely available also made it easier than ever to spread conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods.
That tension — between the amazing power of open information and the chaos that comes with it — is something we're still living with today.
________________________________________
13:11 Conclusion
So: the 1990s ended communism, fought and won a quick war, signed free trade deals that reshaped local economies, impeached a president, and handed the internet to the world.
Not a bad decade for a country that was just figuring out what it was supposed to do after the Cold War.
Next time — things get a lot heavier.