Further Reading
George-Warren, Holly.The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia
of Rock and Roll. New York: Fireside, 2001. A com-
prehensive history of rock and roll.
Jeffries, Stan.Encyclopedia of World Pop Music: 1980-
2001. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2003. A
thorough look into the music that defined the
1990’s.
Struthers, Irene. “Sinéad O’Connor.” InPopular Mu-
sicians, edited by Steve Hochman. Vol. 3. Pasa-
dena, Calif.: Salem Press, 1999. Four-column
summary of O’Connor’s life and career.
Woodstra, Chris.All Music Guide to Rock: The Defini-
tive Guide to Rock, Pop, and Soul. San Francisco:
Backbeat Books, 2002. A complete guide to all
things music.
Sara Vidar
See also Alternative rock; Electronic music; Grunge
music; Love, Courtney; Madonna; Morissette, Alanis;
Music; Nine Inch Nails; Nirvana; Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame Museum; Rock the Vote.
Oklahoma City bombing
The Event A terrorist attack kills 168 people and
injures 842
Date April 19, 1995
Place Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
This was the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States
until the attacks on September 11, 2001.
On April 19, 1995, the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, was
destroyed by a bomb, killing 168 people and injur-
ing 842 others. The conspiracy began a year earlier,
when a man named Timothy McVeigh and others
met in a trailer in Kingman, Arizona. Investigators
later learned that McVeigh hated the government
for its raid on the Branch Davidian compound on
April 19, 1993, in Waco, Texas, as well as the incident
at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. He chose the two-year
anniversary of the Waco siege to carry out his attack.
The other man involved in the bombing was Terry
Nichols, an Army friend of McVeigh from Michigan.
The Bombing Two days before the bombing, using
false identification with the name “Robert D. Kling,”
Timothy McVeigh rented a Ryder truck in Junction
City, Kansas, 270 miles from Oklahoma City. He and
Nichols packed 108 bags of ammonium nitrate fer-
tilizer, three fifty-five-gallon drums of liquid nitro-
methane, and several crates of explosives into the
Ryder truck and moved it to Geary County State
Lake, where they mixed the materials; a dual-fuse ig-
nition system finished the truck bomb. At this point,
Nichols left for Herington, Kansas, while McVeigh
drove the truck to Oklahoma City.
Carrying quotes from white supremacist William
Luther Pierce’sThe Turner Diaries(1978), McVeigh
drove toward the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building
on the morning of April 19. At 8:57a.m., he lit a five-
minute fuse before parking the truck in front of an
employee day-care center on the north side of the
federal building. He then walked back to his getaway
vehicle, which he had parked there days before.
At 9:02a.m., the bomb discharged, destroying a
third of the building and leaving a thirty-foot-wide
crater. The explosion damaged more than three
hundred other buildings; the blast could be felt
more than fifty miles away and measured approxi-
mately 3.0 on the Richter scale. The victims, nine-
teen of whom were children, ranged in age from
three months to seventy-three years.The Aftermath At 9:25a.m., State Emergency Op-
erations Center (SEOC) specialists arrived on the
scene. In addition, representatives from the Air
Force, the Civil Air Patrol, the American Red Cross,
the Oklahoma National Guard, and the Department
of Civil Emergency Management were quickly on
hand. Fifty people were rescued from the building
and treated at local hospitals. Meanwhile, news
trucks arrived en masse and began broadcasting. Ini-
tial stories speculated that there was a Middle East-
ern connection to the bombing, given that the 1993
World Trade Center bombing was masterminded by
Islamic terrorists.
Similarly, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investi-
gation (FBI) initially believed the Oklahoma City
bombing to be an outside terrorist attack on the
United States and immediately sent government in-
vestigators to Oklahoma City. They soon found a
piece of metal that turned out to be the truck axle. It
was etched with a vehicle number that was quickly
traced to Junction City, Kansas. In addition, a nearby
bank videotape showed the Ryder truck parked in
front of the building. They were well on their way
to capturing the perpetrators. Composite sketches632 Oklahoma City bombing The Nineties in America