Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) entered the White House in 1981, pledging to renew American pressure on the Soviet Union. His hard-line policy against the Soviets ultimately resulted in Reagan’s crowning legacy, the collapse of Communism shortly after he left office. Reagan’s domestic record, however, was mixed. To his supporters, Reagan’s tax cuts and deregulation of many large industries strengthened the foundations of the American economy. Detractors point out the massive national debt run up by his administration, bills that the nation continues to pay twenty years later.
Reagan grew up in Illinois and graduated from Eureka College in 1932 before moving to California to begin his acting career. In the golden age of Hollywood, Reagan starred in a number of popular films, achieving his most lasting cinematic fame for his portrayal of legendary Notre Dame football player George “The Gipper” Gipp. At the time, Reagan considered himself a Democrat, and voted for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As his film career faded, Reagan’s interest in national politics grew, and he began to lose faith in the Democratic Party. His staunch opposition to communism and support for free-market economic theories found favor with a growing conservative movement in the 1960s. He officially changed parties, famously declaring, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the party left me.” Reagan ran for governor of California in 1966 and defeated an incumbent Democrat.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reagan’s Republican Party was dominated by traditionalist Midwestern and northeastern Republicans like Gerald Ford, who became president after the resignation of President Nixon. Reagan represented a more ideologically conservative wing of the party and challenged Ford for the party’s 1976 presidential nomination. Although Reagan lost, that campaign laid the challenge for his successful 1980 campaign for the GOP nomination.
As president, Reagan sharply increased military spending, passed several tax cuts, and increased the American arsenal of nuclear weaponry. The Soviets tried to keep pace with the American military build-up, and historians believe the pressure on their economy contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 under Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush (1924–).
ADDITIONAL FACTS
1. One of Reagan’s first jobs after graduating from college was as a broadcaster of Chicago Cubs games for an Iowa radio station, WOC.
2. Reagan served five terms as the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, a union for Hollywood actors, during the 1940s and 1950s, and is the only union member elected president of the United States.
3. At 69 in 1980, Reagan was the oldest man elected president.
On August 2, 1990, the army of Iraq launched a surprise invasion of its tiny Persian Gulf neighbor, Kuwait. The Kuwaiti defenders, badly outgunned, surrendered within hours. Five months later, however, after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) repeatedly ignored demands by the international community to withdraw his forces from oil-rich Kuwait, American and allied forces liberated the country and restored its pro-American monarchy in the brief Gulf War.
In the wake of the Iraqi invasion, the administration of US President George H. W. Bush (1924–) feared Hussein’s next step would be to send his troops into Saudi Arabia, a long-standing American ally and the world’s largest oil producer. A successful Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, they feared, would seriously alter the balance of power in the Middle East and embolden a dictator they considered a dangerous maniac. Although Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy collected billions of dollars in oil revenues, it had virtually no military to defend itself.
To protect Saudi Arabia, Bush hastily assembled an international coalition that was dispatched to the Persian Gulf in the fall of 1990. The American contingent alone amounted to half a million troops, the largest foreign combat force sent abroad since the Vietnam War (1957–1975). In addition, Bush warned Hussein that unless Iraqi troops left Kuwait by mid-January 1991, the allies would force them out.
The Gulf War began shortly after the January deadline passed. Militarily, the war proved to be a tremendous mismatch. Although the Iraqi army seemed large and powerful on paper, it stood no chance against the smart bombs, night-vision goggles, and advanced weaponry of the United States and its allies. The war showcased the gigantic strides in military technology the United States had made since the Vietnam War. Allied casualties were light—378 dead, compared to tens of thousands of Iraqis.
After making short work of the Iraqi invasion force in Kuwait, American commanders briefly crossed the border into Iraq. However, Bush and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney (1941–), decided against continuing on to Baghdad. Removing Hussein from power, they felt, would create chaos in the country and turn allied troops from liberators of Kuwait into occupiers of Iraq. Unfortunately, their worries proved prescient. Hussein would remain in power until the United States invaded in 2003, removing the dictator but sparking a bloody and ongoing civil war.
1. The great World War II–era battleships USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin both performed their last active-duty combat missions during the Gulf War, bombarding Iraqi forces in Kuwait and Iraq.
2. The war resulted in an ecological catastrophe for the Persian Gulf region, when Iraq dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of oil into the gulf and many oil wells were set on fire, spewing dangerous smoke into the atmosphere.
3. Although expensive, most of the financial cost of the Gulf War was repaid by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, with other contributions coming from Germany and Japan, nations that did not send troops.
The Stonewall riot, a three-day protest in 1969 against police harassment of gays and lesbians in New York City, is considered the founding event of the gay rights movement. Stonewall’s anniversary is now celebrated around the world as Gay Pride Day.
Before the late 1960’s, homosexuality was widely considered a psychiatric disorder and a public menace. In New York and most other major cities, the police regularly raided gay bars and arrested gays on indecency charges.
“Gay bars were frightening,” one patron recalled years later in the New York Times. “You never knew what might happen, especially with police raids. The cops treated customers like scum.”
The Stonewall Inn, a gay bar at 53 Christopher Street in New York’s bohemian Greenwich Village neighborhood, was the target of one such raid on the early morning of June 28, 1969. Although many of the patrons of the bar had endured police raids before, that night they fought back, throwing bricks, coins, and beer cans at the officers. The ensuing melee soon spilled out onto nearby streets, where clashes with police continued for several days after.
In the wake of Stonewall, gay and lesbian rights groups became far more aggressive, demanding an end to police harassment and demeaning antigay laws.
By the early 1970s, New York and other American cities would stop many of the worst indignities imposed on gays, including the notorious raids, and major medical organizations would stop labeling homosexuality as a disorder. In the three decades since then, civil rights groups have successfully expanded legal protections for gays and lesbians, including the addition of sexual orientation to many anti-discrimination statutes. Modern gay rights groups continue to draw inspiration from the men and women at the Stonewall Inn who took a dramatic stand against discrimination and harassment.
1. The federal government added the Stonewall Inn to the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, on the thirtieth anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion.
2. Although laws against gay sex were rarely enforced, they remained on the books in many states until they were ruled unconstitutional in a 2003 Supreme Court decision, Lawrence v. Texas.
3. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first US state to allow gays to wed. Several European countries, South Africa, and Canada have also extended marriage rights to gays. Some religious groups have battled against gay marriage in the United States, however, and dozens of states have passed laws explicitly banning gay marriage.
The collapse of the Enron Corporation in 2001 triggered one of the most significant business scandals in recent American history and resulted in several major changes to corporate law. Although litigation and criminal investigations related to Enron’s shady financing were still ongoing as of 2007, the historical significance of the company’s bankruptcy is already evident from the raft of new business legislation imposed on US corporations after Enron’s downfall.
Enron, founded in 1985 by Texas business executive Kenneth Lay (1942–2006), initially specialized in natural gas pipelines and transmission lines for electricity. During the 1990s, Enron generated billions of dollars in profits by expanding into the market for derivatives. A derivative is a financial instrument that can be used to lessen risk. In essence, a derivative is a tradable contract to pay a certain price for a good or service at a future date; derivatives are often purchased to lock in a price for vital goods like oil or electricity.
During the 1990s, flush from its success in derivatives trading, Enron was widely considered a model of cutting-edge corporate management. However, the company’s financial records came under scrutiny in 2001, and it quickly emerged that executives at the company had overstated Enron’s earnings by several hundred million dollars and set up deceptive shell companies to hide Enron’s huge losses. Stunningly, the Fortune 500 company collapsed within a few weeks toward the end of 2001. Many employees of the Houston-based firm lost their life savings, which had been invested in Enron stock in the company’s 401(k) retirement plan, and top executives were soon arrested for fraud. Arthur Andersen, the firm that handled Enron’s accounting, went out of business as a result of its association with the disgraced company.
In the wake of the Enron scandal and a similar accounting scandal at WorldCom, a telecommunications company, the United States Congress approved the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law that is meant to create greater transparency in corporate accounting and make executives personally responsible for their companies’ financial statements. The law, signed by President George W. Bush (1946–) in 2002, represented a renewed effort by the government to tighten regulations on American businesses. However, corporate executives continue to complain about the cost of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, and the law’s future remains uncertain.
1. The home of the Houston Astros, Enron Field, was renamed Minute Maid Park after the company’s collapse.
2. Lay, Enron’s founder, died in July 2006, a few months before he was due to be sentenced for fraud. Jeff Skilling (1953–), the company’s CEO at the time of the collapse, was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.
3. The Enron collapse was explained in the Oscar-nominated 2005 documentary feature film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.
One of the deadliest natural disasters in American history, Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005, killing about 1,800 people and destroying much of the historic city of New Orleans. As of 2007, hundreds of thousands of people remain displaced from their homes as a result of the devastating storm. In monetary terms, Katrina caused more damage—estimated at around $80 billion—than any other disaster in the nation’s history.
The storm, a Category 5 hurricane—the strongest possible on the scale, classified as “devastating”—formed in the Atlantic Ocean and hit New Orleans on August 29. Although most city residents had obeyed an order to evacuate, thousands remained in their homes. Others fled to the Superdome, a New Orleans football stadium that had been opened to the public as an emergency shelter.
When it struck, Katrina was one of the strongest storms ever to reach land in the United States. Wind speeds of more than 120 miles per hour were reported across coastal Louisiana and Mississippi, and massive flooding occurred across the region.
The aftermath of the storm, however, caused more deaths than the hurricane itself. Levees at a lake in New Orleans were breached, and 80 percent of the city was inundated with floodwater. Live television coverage beamed around the world captured images of city residents on their roofs—for some, the only part of their home that remained above water. Many of the storm’s victims were poor, elderly, and African-American residents who had not been able to flee. Supplies at the Superdome were exhausted, and after chaos erupted there, the stadium quickly became a symbol of government dysfunction during the crisis. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael D. Brown (1954–), was forced to resign as a result of the agency’s inept response to the disaster.
The historical significance of Hurricane Katrina may be too early to assess. Politicians from both major political parties have vowed to rebuild New Orleans, but the city’s population remains significantly lower and many residents have yet to return to the city.
1. In recognition of the devastation caused by the storm, the name Katrina has been removed from the list of possible future hurricane names.
2. As a result of evacuations, the population of the entire state of Louisiana declined by about 5 percent between 2005 and 2006.
3. In a reprise of the American response to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the United States declined many foreign offers of assistance—including medical assistance offered from nearby communist Cuba.
The American writer to most recently win the Nobel Prize for Literature, novelist Toni Morrison (1931–) was honored in 1993 for her rich, complex novels such as Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) that, in the words of her award citation, have “given the Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece.”
Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio. In 1958, she married Harold Morrison; they divorced in 1964. As Toni Morrison, she wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), while teaching at Howard University. The main character of the novel, which is set in Depression-era Ohio, is a black girl named Pecola who yearns for blue eyes like the white child movie star Shirley Temple (1928–).
Like most of Morrison’s work, the novel takes an unflinching look at American society, dealing frankly with themes of child abuse and racism. After publishing The Bluest Eye, Morrison wrote Sula in 1973 and Song of Solomon, one of her most highly regarded works, in 1977.
By the time Morrison published Beloved in 1987, she was already considered one of the leading American novelists. Beloved—the story of an African-American escaped slave named Sethe who kills her baby rather than allow her to be taken back into slavery—was a literary sensation, winning the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and solidifying Morrison’s critical reputation.
Morrison’s writing style, influenced by William Faulkner (1897–1962), is often nonlinear and fragmentary. For instance, the narration of Beloved jumps between the 1850s and 1870s, often with little or no warning. Indeed, the wandering time frame reflects the major themes of the novel: the difficulty of dealing with traumatic memories and the crushing psychological damage caused by slavery.
After winning the Nobel Prize, Morrison released Paradise in 1998 and Love in 2003, both of which received enthusiastic reviews. She recently retired from a professorship at Princeton University but continues to write and publish. A 2006 poll of prominent authors in the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the top American novel of the last twenty-five years, a testament to Morrison’s standing within contemporary American literature.
1. Morrison wrote a 1986 play, Dreaming Emmett, about the murder of Emmett Till (1941–1955).
2. A movie version of Beloved was made in 1998 starring Oprah Winfrey as Sethe.
3. Beloved was based on the true story of Margaret Graner, an escaped slave who killed one of her children in 1851 to keep him from being taken back into slavery.
First aired in 1989 on the Fox television network, the animated sitcom The Simpsons topped Time magazine’s ranking of the twentieth century’s best television shows and is generally considered one of the best-ever American TV series. Globally popular, new episodes of The Simpsons are still being made as of 2007, and the show is also widely broadcast in syndication.
The show was created in the late 1980s by cartoonist Matt Groening (1954–) and Hollywood screenwriter James L. Brooks (1940–). Many of the characters in the Simpson family were named after Groening’s relatives. Although a cartoon, from its very beginning The Simpsons was much edgier than many of its live-action competitors. The show frequently holds authority figures in the fictional town of Springfield up for ridicule, and it often mocks television itself.
The Simpson family—Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart, and Maggie—and the show’s numerous supporting characters, like convenience store clerk Apu Nahasapeemapetilon and villainous nuclear power plant owner Charles Montgomery Burns, have become cultural mainstays familiar to many Americans. But did you know:
One of the voice actors in The Simpsons, Harry Shearer, also appeared in the 1984 cult film This is Spinal Tap.
Before The Simpsons, Groening created a print comic strip named Life in Hell that featured talking rabbits.
The Simpsons began as a series of crudely drawn shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show on Fox in 1987.
The word “D’oh,” often uttered by Homer Simpson, has been inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary as an annoyed exclamation.
After a national competition in the summer of 2007, the small town of Springfield, Vermont, was selected as the “official” hometown of The Simpsons.
The show has won countless Emmy Awards, and a highly anticipated movie version was released in 2007.
1. Eight-year-old Lisa Simpson, the irritating, self-righteous middle child in the family, became a vegetarian in a 1995 episode of the show that featured former Beatle and vegetarian Paul McCartney (1942–).
2. The program is broadcast around the world dubbed in local languages, although in Muslim countries it is edited to remove the show’s rampant references to alcohol.
3. Tony Blair (1953–), the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, appeared in cartoon form as a guest star on the show in 2003.