1990s

File:1990s decade montage.png|From top left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope orbits the Earth after it was launched in 1990; American jets fly over burning oil fields in the 1991 Gulf War; the Oslo Accords on 13 September 1993; the World Wide Web gains massive popularity worldwide; Boris Yeltsin greets crowds after the failed August Coup, which leads to the dissolution of the Soviet Union on 26 December 1991; Dolly the sheep is the first mammal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell; the funeral procession of Diana, Princess of Wales, who died in a 1997 car crash, and was mourned by billions; hundreds of thousands of Tutsi people are killed in the Rwandan genocide of 1994|upright=1.4|thumb rect 1 1 385 312 Hubble Space Telescope rect 392 1 1101 312 Gulf War rect 477 318 1101 718 Oslo Accords rect 723 724 1101 1080 Internet rect 311 723 717 1080 Dissolution of the Soviet Union rect 1 723 305 1080 Dolly the sheep rect 1 535 471 717 Death of Diana, Princess of Wales rect 1 317 236 529 Rwandan genocide rect 236 317 471 529 Second Congo War desc bottom-left

The 1990s (often referred and shortened to as "'''the '90s", "the Nineties", "the 90's", or "the '90's'''") was the decade that began on 1 January 1990, and ended on 31 December 1999. Known as the "post-Cold War decade", the 1990s were culturally imagined as the period from the Revolutions of 1989 until the September 11 attacks in 2001. The dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the end of Russia's status as a superpower, the end of a multipolar world, and the rise of anti-Western sentiment. China was still recovering from a politically and economically turbulent period. This allowed the US to emerge as the world's sole superpower, creating relative peace and prosperity for many western countries. During this decade, the world population grew from 5.3 to 6.1 billion.