American History: The Final Decade of the Century
August 16, 2012
Jerry Seinfeld, left, Julia Louise-Dreyfus and Jason Alexander at the Emmy Awards in 1993
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.
This week in our series, we take a look at life in the United States during the last decade of the twentieth century.
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For most of the nineteen nineties, the nation was at peace. The Soviet Union collapsed in nineteen ninety-one, bringing an end to years of costly military competition.
During the nineties the American economy recovered from a recession and grew strong. Inflation and unemployment were low. There were new developments in medicine and technology. The Internet began to evolve from a defense project mainly linking researchers into a new way for the world to communicate.
America grew by almost thirty-three million people during the nineteen nineties -- the largest increase of any decade in its history. By the end of the nineties more than two hundred eighty-million people were living in the United States.
During the decade of the nineties, there was a large increase in immigration from Latin America, the Caribbean and Asia. For the first time in seventy years, one in ten Americans was born in another country.
At the same time, the population was getting older. That added to the nation's health care costs. America's new president, Bill Clinton, promised to reform the health care system. But in the end, like other presidents before him, Clinton failed to win support for that idea in Congress.
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