Recent History
Main articles: 1990s, History of the United States (since 1988), and History of Canada (1992–present)The End of the Cold War and the beginning of the era of sustained economic expansion coincided during the 1990s. On January 1, 1994 Canada, Mexico and the United States signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, creating the world's largest free trade area. In 2000, Vicente Fox became the first non-PRI candidate to win the Mexican presidency in over 70 years.
The optimism of the 1990s was shattered by the 9/11 attacks of 2001 on the United States, which prompted military intervention in Afghanistan, which Canada also participated in. Canada and Mexico did not support the United States's later move to invade Iraq.
Starting in the summer of 2007, a financial crisis in the United States eventually triggered a worldwide recession.
In 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African American to be President of the United States. Two years later, Osama Bin Laden, perpetrator of 9/11, was found and killed. In December 2011, the Iraq War was declared formally over.
Read more about this topic: History Of North America
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“The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)