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The long American war in the Middle East begins. 

The culture war begins. 

Rap music, still a young genre, finally sees chart-topping success in 1990, beginning to reach its way now into the suburbs and onto mainstream airwaves. But it's also in 1990 that hip hop solidifies itself as what Public Enemy rapper Chuck D called "black people's CNN," giving voice to black frustration and anger. That mounting black anger in 1990 finds expression in a new marriage of hip hop and American Islam. 

President Bush searches for ways to describe this new American power after the Cold War. He joins Fukuyama, Governor Bill Clinton and even Janet Jackson in imagining a world in which borders matter less and less.  The American television landscape will also begin to see dramatic changes at the beginning of the decade.  Please support Things Done Changed on Patreon! https://www.pateon.com/thingsdonechanged       

The end of the Cold War inaugurates a new epoch: With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States is poised to become the first uncontested global imperial power in the history of humankind. The American victory over the Soviets also establishes capitalism as a global system, arguably a more important development than the emergence of the US as the world’s only global superpower. With the sudden, if unsurprising, collapse of the Soviet Union underway, America finds itself searching for the meaning of it all as the decade opens. A grand theory emerges to become the leading theory among the political elite: The American victory was not simply the end of the war but the end of history itself. The theory, offered by Francis Fukuyama and echoed by President Bush, announces that the “end of history” is nothing short of the eventual Americanization of the world. And as the 1990s opens, the age of the American shopping mall is at its height.   Please support Things Done Changed on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/thingsdonechanged

Welcome to Things Done Changed: America in the '90s, beginning September 14!  Follow the podcast on Facebook here. Follow on Twitter: @ninetiespod And please consider supporting the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thingsdonechanged