- The Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had been a threat to the safety of the world since the 1950s, but in the 1980s it drew to a close. President Ronald Reagan ramped up U.S. defense spending after taking office in 1981, but when Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985, the country moved towards "perestroika," a radical series of economic and political reforms. This paved the way for a thawing of relations with the West. By the end of the 1980s, communist regimes across Eastern Europe were falling and the Cold War was effectively over.
- President Ronald Reagan was convinced that the private sector held the key to economic success. He cut taxes to stimulate the economy, encouraging individuals to spend by leaving more dollars in their pocket. The U.S. emerged from the recession of 1982 into a boom described by the Library of Congress as "one of the longest periods of sustained economic growth since World War II." However, cuts to domestic spending meant that the divide between rich and poor was accentuated, while the consumer boom was unsustainable. The nation fell into debt and millions of American children were left mired in poverty. In 1987, with America $3 trillion in debt, the stock market crashed, leading to increasingly widespread criticism of Reagan's political philosophy.
- The 1980s were the decade of unbridled capitalism and its product, the young, upwardly mobile professional -- the yuppie. Their spending patterns were mimicked by a far wider section of society, leading to a doubling of consumer debt between 1980 and 1990. It was a decade whose philosophy was summed up by fictional corporate raider Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film "Wall Street": "Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed... clarifies and captures the evolutionary spirit."
- In 1982, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control formally categorized "acquired immune deficiency syndrome." The first known cases in the U.S. were five homosexual men from Los Angeles and, initially, there was a public misconception that AIDS was "a gay disease." The CDC soon disproved this. The campaign to find a cure gained public attention when the actor Rock Hudson announced that he was suffering with AIDS; by 1985, Hudson had died. By 1990, many more thousands of Americans had died of AIDS, but public understanding had increased and treatments had been brought to the market.
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