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William Jefferson ("Bill") Clinton

Governor of Arkansas, (rumors of him being a womanizer) democratic party candidate. Chose Albert Gore as his running mate. Campaign revolved around the economy, his slogan being “It’s the economy stupid.”

Albert Gore

Senator of Tennessee, Bill Clinton's running mate in the Election of 1992

Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)

Nonprofit organization. The group attempted to push the Democratic party toward pro-growth, strong defense, and anti-crime policies. Among its most influential early members was Bill Clinton, who it held up as an example of "third way" politics.

J. Danforth Quayle

H. W. Bush's vice president

H. Ross Perot

Texas billionaire who talked about the federal deficit and made it known that he never held any public office. Nearly 20% of voters sided with the independent presidential candidate

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Clinton's nominee, joined Sandra Day O'Connor as Second female Supreme Court Justice

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

From 1993 to 2010, the policy affecting homosexuals in the military. It emerged as a compromise between the standing prohibition against homosexuals in the armed forces and President Clinton's push to allow all citizens to serve regardless of sexual orientation. Military authorities were forbidden to ask about a service member's orientation, and gay service personnel could be discharged if they publicly revealed their homosexuality. At President Obama's urging, Congress repealed DADT in 2010, permitting gays to serve openly in uniform.

Hillary Rodham Clinton

First lady to hold elective office and become the party’s presidential nominee. Appointed by Clinton as the director of a task force charged with redesigning the medical-service industry. Super awesome lawyer and children’s advocate

Oklahoma City bombing

Truck-bomb explosion that killed 168 people in a federal office building on April 19, 1995. The attack was perpetrated by right-wing and antigovernment militant Timothy McVeigh, who was later executed by the U.S. government for the crime.

Timothy McVeigh

Perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing. First person executed by the federal government in 40ish years. Right wing and anti-government militant

Deficit Reduction Bill

Passed by congress without Republican support. Helped decrease federal deficits by increasing tax on the wealthy and cutting back on spending.

Anti-Crime Bill

Clinton signed the most far-reaching bill. Funding for 100,000 new police officers and the construction of more prisons and a federal ban on certain assault weapons 

Branch Davidians

A Fundamentalist sect. The Oklahoma City bombing was due to a standoff between federal agents and this sect, which resulted in the destruction of the sect's compound and the deaths of many.

Newt Gingrich

Outspoken Georgia representative who led the Republicans to seize a golden opportunity in the midterms of 1994. They offered voters a Contract with America. Speaker of the House

Contract with America

Offered voters a multipoint program that proposed smaller government, reform, term limits, emphasis on personal responsibility, etc. Huge blow to Clinton administration. Super conservative program

Welfare Reform Bill

Huge win for conservatives. Blow to his own party. The bill made deep cuts in welfare grants and required those who could qualify for welfare to find employment. Part of Bill Clinton's campaign platform in 1992, the reforms were widely seen by liberals as an abandonment of key New Deal/Great Society provisions to care for the impoverished.

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996

Along with a proposal to declare English as the country's official language, these congressional initiatives reflected a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment

El Norte

The first significant numbers of Mexicans headed here when the Mexican Revolution happened. 

Mutualistas

sponsored baseball leagues, helped the sick and disabled, and defended their members against discrimination.

Braceros

started during WWII brought 5 million Mexican seasonal farmworkers to the U.S. It stopped in 1964

Robert Dole

Senate Majority Leader, Republican presidential candidate who was a WWII veteran. He had his work cut out for him with a rebounding domestic economy, a peaceful global scene, and combined with a not really powerful presence on the campaign trail

Soccer Moms

Middle-class female suburbanites

Proposition 209

Voters in CA approved this to prohibit affirmative-action preferences in government and higher education, causing the number of minority students in the state's public universities to temporarily plummet

Hopwood v. Texas

A federal appeals court decision had a similar effect to that of Proposition 209 in CA towards affirmative action

Los Angeles riots

After police officers were acquitted for assaulting Rodney King, a black motorist, a ferocious riot broke out in Los Angeles in 1992, engulfing the city for five days. Korean-American grocery stores in particular were targeted by looters, resulting in $400 million in damages. The riot resulted in nearly 2500 casualties and badly strained relations between minority ethnic groups.

O. J. Simpson

Black former football hero who was accused of murdering his white former wife in widely publicized trials. He was acquitted after months of testimony that seemed to point to his guilt, due to LA police officers involved in the case expressing some racist sentiments. Race was a key factor, with black people believing the acquittal was correct, and white people believing it to be unjust

Shelby Steele

African American intellectual. who wrote the book The Content of Our Character 

Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington and LeBron James

national celeberities

Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives

financial contracts that could be bought outside of regulated exchanges—like drugs sold "over the counter" without a medical prescription— bypassing regulatory scrutiny. Deregulated during the Clinton administration, OTC derivatives and other similarly exotic financial instruments contributed significantly to the 2008 financial crisis.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Free-trade zone encompassing Mexico, Canada, and the United States. Symbolized the increased reality of a globalized marketplace and was passed despite opposition from protectionists and labor leaders.

World Trade Organization (WTO)

An international body to promote and supervise liberal trade among nations. The successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), it marked a key world trade policy achievement of the Clinton administration.

Darlene M Iskra

the first woman to command a U.S navy vessel. 

Venus and Serena Williams

Tennis champions

Family and Medical Leave Act

Mandate job protection for working fathers as well as mothers who needed to take time off from work for family-related reasons

Slobodan Milošević

Serbian president who unleashed a new round ethnic cleansing in the region, this time against ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo

Yitzhak Rabin

Israeli premier who agreed with the PLO's leader in principle on the withdrawal of Israeli forces from areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and political self-rule for the Palestinians living there. However, hopes flickered two years later when he fell to an assassin's bullet

Madeleine Albright

Clinton's second term secretary of state. the first woman to serve as the U.S secretary of state

Yasir Arafat

Leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Died with his dream of creating a Palestinian state still unrealized.

Al Qaeda

‘The base’ in Arabic, the transnational network most effectively organized radical, anti-American Islamist terrorism

USS Cole

U.S. ship bombed in Yemen by Al Qaeda suicide attackers, killing 17

Osama Bin Laden

Wealthy, Saudi-born leader of Al Qaeda, who declared war against all Americans and their allies. He denounced America's growing military presence in the Middle East, as well as its support for Israel

the Troubles

Violent conflicts in Northern Ireland between predominantly Catholic nationalists and predominantly Protestant Loyalists

Whitewater

A series of scandals during Clintons administration that were rooted from a failed real estate investment which the Clintons were said to profit from. The accusations triggered an investigation by a special prosecutor but nothing was found.

Lewinsky Affair

Political sex scandal that resulted in Bill Clinton's impeachment and trial by Congress. In 1998, Clinton gave sworn testimony in a sexual harassment case that he had never engaged in sexual activity with a White House intern. When prosecutors discovered evidence that the president had lied under oath about the affair, to which Clinton admitted, Republicans in Congress began impeachment proceedings. The scandal put a lasting blemish on his presidential legacy.

Albert Gore

Democrat Nominee after Clinton. He had difficulty connecting to the Clinton era peace while distancing himself from Clinton’s personal troubles.

Joseph Lieberman

Gore's running mate in the Election of 2000 for the Democratic party. Outspoken critic of Clinton's behavior in the Lewinsky affair and the first Jew nominated to a major national ticket

George W. Bush

Republican challenger in the election of 2000, won the nomination on the strength of his father's name and his years as governor of Texas. In a clear jab at Clinton, promised to "restore dignity to the White House."

Richard Cheney

Running mate of George W. Bush on the Republican ticket, a Washington insider

Randolph Bourne and Horace Kellen

Cultural pluralist

Multiculturalism

A term that came to prominence in the 1980s, used to describe the vision of a diverse range of ethnic, religious, and cultural communities coexisting within a single national polity, without requiring them to assimilate or agree to a common creed. Often used in opposition to ethnic nationalism.

Tiger Woods and Rosario Dawson

Proud of their mixed heritage

Barack Obama

son of a Kenyan father and Kansan mother, wrote about navigating the complex waters of racial identity in his memoir Dreams from My Father prior to launching himself on the national political stage.

Postmodernism

a late 20th-century movement in philosophy and literary theory that generally questions the basic assumptions of Western philosophy in the modern period

Robert Venturi and Micheal Graves

Postmodernists who revived the decorative details of earlier historical styles, embracing a playful mix of architectural elements and rejected the modernist minimalism.

Modernists

valued minimalism and “Less is more”

Frank Gehry

Used luminous, undulating sheets of metallic skin in the Museum of Pop Culture (2000) in Seattle and the Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003) in Los Angeles.

Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker

combined old and new media to confront, confound, and even offend the viewer

Kara Walker

Made a cut paper silhouette to contrast the antebellum South from gone with the wind with the perspective of an enslaved black woman.

Jeff Koons and Shepard Fairey

blended industrial materials and pop culture imagery to blur the hidebound distinction between highbrow and lowbrow art. Their mash-ups of disparate fragments, often presented in ironic fashion, typified the postmodern artistic vision.

Amy Tan

 wrote The Joy Luck Club talked about dilemmas of growing up Chinese American 

Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Zadie Smith

Expanded on the use of nonlinear narratives, pastiche forms, parody, and paradox by their predecessors

David Foster Wallace

playfully criticized North America's dystopian future in Infinite Jest

Colson Whitehead

probed the stubborn persistence of American racism in The Underground Railroad which won him a pulitzer prize

Toni Morrison

Wove Portrait of maternal affection amidst slavery in Beloved. First African American woman to win the Nobel peace prize for literature.

E. Annie Proulx

Her moving tale of homoerotic love between two ranch-hands in "Brokeback Mountain" (1997) reached a mass audience in 2005 as an award-winning motion picture

James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, and Sherman Alexie

Contributed to a Native American literary renaissance that sought to recover the tribal past while reimagining its present

David Hwang

Asian american playwright

Ha Jin

Wrote evocatively about his country of origin (China) in novels like Waiting (1999) and War Trash (2004)

Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) explored the sometimes painful relationship between immigrant Indian parents and their American-born children

Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Bridged worlds of the Dominican Republic and New jersey using spanglish. Won a Pulitzer prize

Tony Kushner

The AIDS epidemic inspired his sensationally inventive Angels in America (1991)

Jonathan Larson

His Tony Award-winning musical Rent(1996) was inspired by AIDS

Eve Ensler

espoused feminist empowerment (and an end to violence against women) with comic intimacy in her Vagina Monologues (1996)

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Hispanic-American life- In the heights. Hamilton (Pulitzer prize broadway winning musical with a multicultural cast)

Public Enemy, Jay-Z, and Missy Elliott

turned hip-hop into a broadly shared cultural phenomenon

Gloria Estefan and Ricky Martin

As the Latino population grew, so did the star power of these Spanish-language pop stars

Ellen DeGeneres

Sitcom star who declared her sexuality on the cover of Time magazine in 1997 with the headline "Yep, I'm Gay."

the Coen brothers, and Kathryn Bigelow

Found commercially viable strategies for pursuing unconventional cinematic visions

Quentin Tarantino

Wrote Pulp Fiction. Nonlinear stories, dark comedic endings

David Lynch

Mulholland Drive (2001), notable for nonlinear story lines, arcane cinematic allusions, and dark comedic stylings.

John Singleton

Boyz n the Hood (1991) explored family life in South Central Los Angeles

Gregory Nava

made films popular with Latino audiences like Selena (1997), a biopic of a slain Mexican-American singer that made a star of actor Jennifer Lopez