Describe the economic and technological changes of the 1990s and evaluate the debate over free trade and globalization even-handedly.
The 1990s brought a sustained economic boom, aided by a "peace dividend" of reduced Cold War military spending and by a genuinely new technology: the internet, which moved from a specialized research tool into ordinary households over the decade, alongside the rise of companies like Amazon and eBay and a "dot-com" stock boom that would eventually burst around 2000-2001. Bill Clinton, elected in 1992 on a campaign sharply focused on the economy, signed implementing legislation for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law in 1993, phasing out most tariffs between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico starting in 1994. NAFTA sparked a genuine, still-relevant debate: supporters argued freer trade would lower consumer prices and grow the overall economy through specialization, while critics, including 1992 independent candidate Ross Perot, warned of what he memorably called a "giant sucking sound" of manufacturing jobs leaving for lower-wage Mexico -- both predictions turned out to hold real truth, which is part of why the trade debate remains genuinely unresolved rather than settled by the evidence.
Clinton's presidency combined this prosperity with real controversy. Welfare reform in 1996 replaced the old federal cash-assistance program with one emphasizing work requirements, a bipartisan compromise that supporters credited with reducing welfare rolls and critics worried left the safety net thinner for families in genuine crisis. Clinton was impeached by the House in 1998 over charges related to perjury and obstruction of justice connected to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, then acquitted by the Senate in early 1999 -- just the second presidential impeachment in American history up to that time, and, like Watergate before it, a live test of the constitutional impeachment process functioning as designed, regardless of one's view of the underlying conduct. Overseas, the decade's optimism about a peaceful post-Cold War order was complicated by the emergence of the al-Qaeda terrorist network, which bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 -- warning signs of a threat that would fully arrive on American soil the following year.
Mastery looks like: They can describe the 1990s tech/internet boom, present both sides of the NAFTA and welfare-reform debates fairly, and compare Clinton's impeachment outcome to Nixon's.
Common stumbles: Declaring NAFTA or welfare reform a simple success or failure instead of presenting the genuine, still-contested mixed evidence on each side.