90's

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

The 1990s saw a rise in the awareness of multiculturalism compared to the 1980s,^[1] as well as the advance of alternative media. Music movements like grunge, the rave scene, and hip hop became popular with young people worldwide, aided by then-new technology such as cable television and the World Wide Web.

A combination of factors led to a realignment and consolidation of economic and political power across the world and within countries. Such factors include the continued mass mobilization of capital markets through neoliberalism, the thawing and end of the decades-long Cold War, the beginning of the widespread proliferation of new media such as the Internet, increasing scepticism towards the government, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The dot-com frenzy resulted in the dot-com bubble of 1997–2000 that brought great 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, cloning, and the first designer babies^[2] all emerging and being improved upon throughout the decade.

New ethnic conflicts emerged in Africa, the Balkans, and the Caucasus, the former two witnessing 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 following 30 long years of violence.^[3]