During the 1990s, the United States became increasingly tied to a worldwide network of economic, financial, and demographic relationships that increased both the nation's diversity and its interdependence. Immigrants from all over Asia, as well as both legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Central America, contributed to the fast-growing Latino population of America's urban areas. Concerns over, and in a few cases involvement in, regional conflicts across the world, replaced the Cold War as a top foreign policy dilemma. Domestically, President Clinton faced an increasingly hostile Congress that attempted to thwart much of his legislative agenda.

The New Immigration
During the 1990s, immigration returned to the forefront of issues in American society. As a result of the Immigration Act of 1965, immigration had taken on a new look. During the last years of the century, immigrants from all over the Asian continent came to America in large numbers, as did new and even larger numbers of both legal and illegal immigrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Central America. About seven million legal and illegal immigrants arrived in the U.S. between 1975 and 1995. Because of new and faster means of transportation and communication, these most recent immigrants have found it much easier to maintain cultural links with their countries of origin than immigrant groups of America's more distant past. The global nature of the immigration also reshaped the religious faiths of America because immigrants brought with them not only their own brands of Christianity and Judaism but also Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic beliefs.

The Clinton Presidency: Managing a New Global Order
President Clinton's presented an extremely ambitious agenda upon taking office. He pledged to revive the economy and shrink the federal deficit. He called for reform of the welfare and health-care delivery systems as well as measures to reduce the increasing violence that had turned some urban neighborhoods into war zones. Clinton's enemies disliked his politics, but his known moral lapses and assorted accusations of additional misbehavior created the deepest resentment among Republicans. The Whitewater real estate scandal and the president's alleged numerous sexual affairs kept his Republican foes busy digging for additional incriminating evidence, but during his first term in office independent investigations produced no evidence of wrongdoing against him.

While he intended to focus primarily on domestic issues, Clinton became compelled to involve the United States in a number of regional crises throughout the world that had their origins in ethnic and nationalist movements in Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Caribbean. By using American power in a limited and conservative manner, Clinton gained considerable public support for the way he handled these world crises. Clinton attempted, without a great deal of success, to find a lasting peace in the troubled Middle East.

The Clinton Presidency on Trial
Throughout Clinton's presidency, the nation experienced a powerful economic expansion. Economic prosperity was the key to Clinton's popularity during a period of time when the Congress was recaptured by Republican majorities, much of his legislative agenda was stymied, and his personal life was rocked by the scandal of an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. The president did experience some legislative success, particularly with Congress' approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Clinton's welfare reform package. Clinton was also successful in creating economic growth without inflation and in reducing the government's budget deficit dramatically and operating on a balanced budget.

The first half of Clinton's second term was consumed almost entirely by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, in which the president at first lied about and then admitted to a sexual relationship with the young White House intern. Based upon the president's own testimony before a grand jury, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr recommended to the House of Representatives that the president be impeached on the grounds of perjury, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. The Republicans pressed the attack and, despite a general public that was opposed to impeachment, the House of Representatives, voting along strict party lines, voted three articles of impeachment against Clinton. After a month-long hearing, the Senate voted to acquit the president. While the impeachment controversy left the president weakened, the scandal seemed to have little impact on the country. The economy remained remarkably strong with a rate of unemployment at a 30-year low and a stock market soaring.

That strength should have aided Vice President Al Gore in the presidential election of 2000, but Texas Governor George H.W. Bush made the campaign less about issues and more about President Clinton's character. The result was an historically close election that came down to Florida, where voting irregularities surfaced in a number of counties. After a number of legal challenges, the Supreme Court, which normally would not review such results, ruled that the recounts must end. This decision made Bush president of the United States.

Multiculturalism and Contested American Identity
During the 1990s, the new multicultural and global complexion of late-twentieth-century America became fully evident, primarily reflected in political controversies in California. The battles over race, immigration, and multiculturalism suggest that in an era of internationally linked economies and global migrations, the United States remains a nation of nations seeking to accommodate distinctive identities along lines of race, ethnicity, and national origins. If anything, America society was more diverse at the end of the twentieth century than ever before. Social and political stability thus hinged, as in the past, on giving all groups access to the mainstream of American life. Immigration continued to alter the face of the nation. Hispanic and Asian immigrants constituted the largest groups of newcomers. Under the reforms of the Immigration Act of 1965, Asians had surpassed Hispanics by the 1980s in supplying the largest number of legal immigrants, who concentrated heavily in California, Hawaii, and New York City. To deal with a flood of illegal aliens, largely from Central America and Mexico, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Friction with older groups sometimes resulted in violence. The issues of race prejudice and minority poverty still troubled the nation. Incidents of violence and racism troubled even normally tolerant college campuses, on which a series of court cases limited but did not completely eliminate the use of affirmative action in admission policies.

Terrorism In a Global Age
The coordinated terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, orchestrated by Al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, changed the entire tenor of American society. Not only did the attacks kill approximately 3,000 people and displace 20,000 more in lower Manhattan, it pushed the United States into a recession and caused Americans to question their national security to a greater degree than any event since Pearl Harbor. The crisis seemed to energize President Bush, whose conservative policies previously had gained little momentum. Even before the attacks, Bush had instigated a new course in foreign policy, rejecting the multilateralism that had dominated American international relations since World War II. After September 11, with nations around the world rallying to support the U.S., Bush took a defiant stand against the terrorists and quickly targeted Afghanistan, the haven of bin Laden, for his initial attack. Yet a majority of the September 11^th attackers came from Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally whose economic and religious pressures had fostered an environment that supported the development of terrorist networks. Ironically, Cold War politics had helped to supply these groups, which constituted a new kind of threat because their primary goals were religious rather than nationalistic.

The attack on Afghanistan, which ahd refused to expel bin Laden, quickly brought down the Taliban but did not capture the Al Qaeda leader. Moreover, threats at home such as the anthrax virus forced the Bush administration to make the difficult judgment of how much to curtail Americans' individual freedoms int eh name of safety. The USA Patriot Act gave the government broad powers of surveillance that some Americans perceived as excessively intrusive. Thousands of aliens, mostly Arabs and Muslims, were detained without being charged with any crimes; eventually a nearly unanimous Surpeme Court rejected Bush's claim that the government could indefinitely jail American citizens deemed to be "enemy combatants."

While the Bush administration fought the threats at home, they also put into action a plan to overthrow Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein that they had decided upon soon after the September 11^th attack. In September 2002 Bush told the U.N. General Assembly that Hussein held weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that threatened world security. Despite international objections, Bush instituted a doctrine of preemption -- rather than containment -- and attacked Iraq in March 2003 despite U.N. claims that inspectors could find no WMDs. The intial attack was so successful that by May Bush announced an end to major combat operations, but the messy aftermath of the war and the United States' unilateral approach angered both foreign allies and many Americans at home. In 2004, the United States turned over control of Iraq to a provisional government, but the steadily increasing cost both in human lives and financial investments made the war increasingly unpopular. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry attempted to make the failure of Bush's foreign policies the centerpiece of his campaign for the presidency in 2004, but his inability to make a clear case helped Bush to win a second term by a clear if not comfortable margin.