The 1990's

On July 16, 1990, Time magazine put a group of young adults on its cover beneath the word “twentysomething” and asked whether they were laid back, late blooming, or simply lost. The story said they struggled to make decisions, would rather hike the Himalayas than climb the corporate ladder, and had no anthems, no heroes, and an attention span as short as one click of the remote. Those young adults were the same kids who had been labeled “at risk” in the 1980s.

Now they were entering adulthood under a new set of warnings. This is the fifth episode in the Disturbing History series on the American decades, and this time Brian looks back at the 1990s, the decade he grew up in.

The story begins just before the decade officially started, on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down. From there, the episode follows the same path as the rest of the series: beginning with the version of the decade America remembers, then digging into the stories it often forgot. And there was plenty to celebrate. Unemployment fell from 7.8 percent in 1992 to 4 percent by the end of 1999. The Dow climbed from 2,753 to 11,497. The federal government recorded its first budget surplus since 1969. Homicides dropped dramatically.

Teen birth rates declined. Juvenile murder arrests fell by roughly two-thirds.And the generation supposedly unable to make decisions helped build the internet. Then the story moves beneath the surface. Brian examines the 1990s panic over so-called juvenile “super-predators,” a prediction that helped reshape laws across the country even as youth violence was already falling.

He follows that fear into a string of school shootings in Pearl, West Paducah, Jonesboro, and Springfield before arriving at Columbine on April 20, 1999.The episode looks at the propane bombs that were intended to be the real centerpiece of the Columbine attack, the music and video games blamed afterward, and a search warrant affidavit drafted against one of the shooters more than a year earlier that was never presented to a judge. The decade’s fear of the internet gets similar treatment.

A 1995 Time cover story warning about cyberporn relied heavily on a flawed undergraduate study. The panic helped fuel the Communications Decency Act. Most of that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1997, but 26 words survived and became Section 230.Brian also follows the internet boom itself, from Netscape’s 1995 IPO to the rise of Amazon, eBay, Google, and Napster. Then comes the mon