Research Guide to American Literature

Important scientific and technological advances occurred during Clinton’s
presidency. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched in 1990; the World Wide
Web was introduced in 1991, and by 2000 more than one hundred million people
were online in North America. Clinton also contended with issues related to gay
rights. In 1993 the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy was instituted, under which
gays and lesbians could serve in the military as long as their sexual orientations
remained secret. In 1996 Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act,
defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. A signal failure of the
Clinton administration was its attempt to reform the health-care system. Clin-
ton’s presidency coincided with America’s longest peacetime period of economic
expansion, during which the federal budget went from deficit to record surpluses;
some of this prosperity was, however, based on a “bubble” in prices of stocks of
Internet-related companies and on unsustainable increases in home values. Clin-
ton was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives on 19 December 1998
for perjury and obstruction of justice in the investigation of his sexual relationship
with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; he was acquitted of the charges by
the U.S. Senate on 12 February 1999 and left office with the highest approval
rating of any president since the end of World War II.
Advances in communications and transportation, along with the rise of multi-
national corporations and the spread of open markets, furthered globalization,
changing social structures around the world. Although many Americans embraced
the diversity and fluidity characterized by globalization, others regarded them as
an assault on traditional ways of life. The terrorists who carried out bombings
during the 1990s had little in common in terms of religious faith and cultural
upbringing; but they did share an opposition to the U.S. government, which they
envisioned as a threat to their values. In 1993 an Islamic fundamentalist group
detonated a car bomb in a parking garage below the World Trade Center in New
York City, claiming the lives of 6 people and injuring more than 1,000; the group
had intended to harm many more. Two years later, a homemade bomb destroyed
a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring
nearly 700 others in the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil to that time. Timothy
McVeigh had organized the bombing in protest of gun-control legislation and the
fifty-one-day standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidian religious
cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993 that had ended in the burning of the cult’s compound
and the deaths of 82 men, women, and children.
The threat of international and domestic terrorism in the United States
continued throughout the administration of George W. Bush, who became
president in 2001 even though the Democratic candidate, Vice President Al
Gore, had received a majority of the popular vote in the 2000 election. The 11
September 2001 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the
Pentagon, and brought down an airliner in a Pennsylvania field claimed the lives
of nearly three thousand victims, including not just Americans but also nationals
from more than ninety countries. In response, the United States departed from
the quick and localized military interventions of the previous two decades by
instituting the “war on terror” against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other Islamist
militant groups. Afghanistan and Iraq were invaded and occupied, ending the

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