Information Age (1991-Present)

At the same time, the United States and USSR were also involved in another global conflict, the Vietnam War. The conflict began in 1954 when France lost the French Indochina War, dividing Vietnam into the democratic South and communist North alongside the seventeenth parallel, also called the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone. The Viet Cong, a revolutionary group from the North, waged war against the South, spiraling into guerilla warfare by the late 1950s. Akin to the Korean War, the United States provided aid and resources to South Vietnam while both China and the Soviet Union did the same for the North. Tensions heightened in 1964 when North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked US forces in the Gulf of Tonkin, resulting in the American government passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the authority to wage war without a formal declaration of war from Congress. Now in a formal war, additional military forces were sent to South Vietnam and fighting continued for nearly a decade. Upon election in 1969, President Richard Nixon vowed to end the Vietnam war and, in 1973, signed the Paris Peace Accords alongside South and North Vietnam, and Viet Cong to bring peace to Vietnam as a whole. South Vietnam did not receive any additional military aid or funding from the United States and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people evacuated. Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, fell to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975, reuniting Vietnam as one country under a communist government. The Cold War continued into the Ronald Reagan Administration of the 1980s and, as with Nixon and the Vietnam War, President Reagan stated his intentions to end this decadeslong strife. In June 1987, he gave a speech in West Berlin in which he declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Finally on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, reuniting East and West Germany. Two years later, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, officially ending the Cold War.

The United States also faced a domestic crisis during the 1980s with the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) epidemic. In 1981, health professionals noticed a spike in Kaposi’s sarcoma cases in New York, particularly in gay men. Symptoms were like those of the flu, joined with the progression of lesions on patients’ skin. As the disease could be contracted through sexual activities and dirty needles, cases spread quickly and over the span of the ‘80s, approximately 100,000 Americans died of AIDs, predominantly gay men. An utter tragedy, the epidemic also spurred medical technological advancements. By 1987, azidothymidine (AZT) was approved by the FDA as a treatment for the disease. The drug restored cell immunity and slowed the progression of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), a precursor to AIDS, into the disease. By the 1990s, AIDS deaths significantly declines and, today in the twenty-first century, is a highly treatable condition in the United States.

The late twentieth century further advanced technology for commercial use. In 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen started Microsoft, creating operating systems and software, like Windows. The following year, in 1976, Steve Jobs founded Apple and began producing computers and other items for everyday citizens. By the 1990s, computers, software, and other technology products became commonplace in an American family’s home. Yet, this technology was not infallible. With the new millennium encroaching, the public feared system failures, concerned that the year 2000 would cause tech to reset or fail because many software programs only used the final two numbers of the year in their programming. This meant that, once the clock struck twelve at midnight, the double zeroes wouldn’t be discernable from the year 1900. This global anxiety earned the name Y2K and largely did not come to fruition.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, terrorists connected to al Qaeda hijacked four airplanes and flew them into major United States buildings. Two planes flew into the World Trade Center towers, and one hit the Pentagon. The fourth plane, Flight 93, was intended for another major US site, potentially the White House or Capitol Building, but the passengers abroad wrested the aircraft out of the hijacker’s control and crashed it into a deserted field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Approximately 2,996 people died from the 9/11 attacks, including over 400 firefighters, paramedics, and other response units. The September 11 attacks led to an all-out restructuring of commercial flights, including the establishment of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), incorporating several stations of screening before passengers could get to their gates. Islamophobia also ramped up in the post-9/11 era, and Middle Eastern Americans were often the targets of hate crimes. 9/11 was also the start of the two decades long Afghanistan War (where al Qaeda was based) from 2001 to 2021. The war had three phases: the fall of the Taliban in Iraq who provided sanctuary for al Qaeda following the attacks (lasting two months), rebuilding and restructuring Afghanistan (2002-2008), and more general counterinsurgency actions, including drone strikes (2008-2021). The conflict ended in 2021 when the United States withdrew all American soldiers in the area. Though, tensions remain tense as Taliban forces have resurged after US forces left.

The 2020s are characterized both in America and internationally by the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting in Wuhan, China in 2019, the disease rapidly spread across the Globe. The first cases in the United States appeared between January 21 and February 23, 2020. On March 14, 2020, President Donald Trump declared a state of emergency over the coronavirus and America, for the most part, shutdown. Schools moved online, events were cancelled, and, generally, the routines of daily life were severely disrupted. Only those deemed essential, like healthcare workers, physically went into work as hospitals filled up with COVID patients. By the next month, doctors developed three vaccines through Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson and Johnson and, slowly but surely, businesses, schools, and organizations reopened, largely returning to fully functioning operations by the following spring. While COVID-19 still remains present in America in 2025 and immunocompromised people are still at risk, it is now a highly treatable illness.