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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of a soldier’s wound beguiles the pain of it.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)