Contemporary history
The Middle East also saw a conflict involving the new state of Israel, the rise of petroleum politics, the continuing prominence but later decline of Arab nationalism, and the growth of Islamism.
Science made new advances after 1945, which included spaceflight, nuclear technology, lasers, semiconductors, molecular biology, genetics, particle physics, and the Standard Model of quantum field theory.
Nasser's Egypt would go on to face the Suez Crisis in 1956, briefly unify with Syria as the United Arab Republic (UAR) from 1958 to 1961, and expensively intervene in the North Yemen civil war from 1962 to 1970.
Portugal, on the other hand, fiercely held onto their Empire, leading to the Portuguese Colonial War from 1961–1974 in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique until the Estado Novo government fell.
Nicaragua suffered the most, with the Nicaraguan Revolution seeing major military aid from both great powers to their favored factions that extended a civil war in the country for decades.
South Korea (in the June Democratic Struggle) and Taiwan (with the lifting of martial law) would take major steps toward liberalization in 1987–1988, shifting from Western-aligned one-party states to more fully participatory democracies.
The Western capitalist economies had proven wealthier and stronger, which made matching the Soviet defense budget to the American one strain limited resources.
South Africa, no longer able to attract Western support by claiming to be anti-communist, ended apartheid in the early 1990s, and many Eastern European countries switched to stable democracies.
[6][7] The hijackers intentionally crashed two of the airliners into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, killing everyone on board and many others working in the buildings.
The United States responded to the 11 September 2001 attacks by launching a "Global War on Terrorism", invading the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan to depose the Taliban, who had harbored al-Qaeda terrorists.
Despite initial coalition successes, the Taliban were never entirely defeated, and continued to hold territory in mountainous regions as well as threaten the new government, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, whose grasp on power outside the major cities was shaky at best.
[19] Many explanations are proffered for the enviable results of these years: relative peace (at least outside the "Third World"); a reduction in average family size; technological improvements; and others.
The 1970s and 80s also saw the rise of the Four Asian Tigers, as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong emulated the Japanese route to prosperity with varying degree of success.
In China, the leftist Gang of Four were overthrown in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping pursued a policy of tentatively opening the Chinese economy to capitalist innovations throughout the 1980s, which would be continued by his successors in the 1990s.
[21] The fall of the USSR saw differing approaches in the 1990s in the East: some newly independent states went in a capitalist direction such as Estonia, some maintained a strong governmental presence in their economy, and some opted for a mix.
The US mortgage-backed securities, which had risks that were hard to assess, were marketed around the world and a broad based credit boom fed a global speculative bubble in real estate and equities.
The collapse of the American housing bubble caused the values of securities tied to real estate pricing to plummet thereafter, damaging financial institutions.
The spread of better recording technology, such as the magnetophon, meant that a musical act could have their song be played over the radio everywhere without loss of sound quality, creating international superstars such as Elvis Presley and The Beatles.
The spread of home television sets allowed people across the globe to easily watch the same show, rather than requiring viewers to attend a local theater.
For example, diaspora groups of immigrants can more easily stay in contact with their family and friends in their origin region, compared to earlier eras where travel and communication was far more expensive, making a narrative of strictly increasing global homogenization incomplete.
To a lesser extent, during the Cold War, something similar happened with the Russian language in the Eastern Bloc and among communist-aligned factions; however, this status was mostly reversed after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The decline of Christianity in the Western world has been perhaps the most notable of these trends, although many non-Western cultures have been affected as well, such as the rise of irreligion in China (buttressed by antireligious campaigns).
As users gradually switched from personal web pages to blogs to social media, many surprising effects have resulted with both positive and negative assessments.
Optimistic assessments often praise the decentralized nature that allows anyone to theoretically gain a platform without the need to convince a publisher or media company to back them, as well as the ease in enabling like-minded people to collaborate at long-distance, even if the digital utopianism of the 1990s is less common.
Pessimistic assessments worry about the effects on children such as enabling cyberbullying; filter bubbles where Internet users are not challenged by outsider views; "cancel culture" where people are pilloried online but sometimes disproportionately; and slacktivism as an appealing but ineffective replacement for older forms of community work.
The growing world population and rising standards of living has caused a vast increase in demand for energy development, both to power vehicles such as personal cars as well as on public electrical grids.
While these energy sources are considered to be much less environmentally impactful than fossil fuels, concerns have been raised over the various rare earth metals used in the production of batteries and solar, which can require destructive mining techniques to gather.
By late 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, tracking the rise of Google (founded 1998), which had developed new approaches to relevancy ranking.
Database size, which had been a significant marketing feature through the early 2000s (decade), was similarly displaced by emphasis on relevancy ranking, the methods by which search engines attempt to sort the best results first.
In 2020, an outbreak of the COVID-19 disease, first documented in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, spread to other countries becoming a global pandemic, which caused a major socio-economic disruption all over the world.
