Huge Moments In The '90s We've All Forgotten About

After the rough and rocky decade we call the 2010s, the 1990s have emerged as the era we return to over and over again — the place we go to for some much-needed nostalgia and a reminder of more innocent times.

Whether it's binge-watching Friends and Seinfeld to get us through lockdown or the revival of '90s fashion and technology such as cassette tapes and Polaroid cameras, the last decade of the previous century is everywhere. And in many ways, it really was a simpler time. The internet was in its infancy, cell phones were only owned by yuppies, and phrases like "fake news" and "alternative facts" would have been met with blind incredulity. Oh, those lucky, innocent people of the past.

But that's not to say that the '90s were any less nutso in terms of world events and life-changing news than we are constantly bombarded with on our social media feeds today. There are some stories that define the era: the O.J. Simpson trial, the death of Princess Diana, and the extramarital misbehaviors of Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. But there are also some huge events that many of us have forgotten about today, happenings that, as seismic as they were, we don't typically associate with the decade that we all now romanticize so much. Here's a refresher course of some of the biggest unremembered news stories of the '90s.

Sometimes you come across an old news story that really does show how far we've come. Back in 1990, after a decade in which the AIDS epidemic dominated the headlines and the gay community was continually in the spotlight, the World Health Organization (WHO) chose the date of May 17 to release a bulletin that would change the perception of homosexuality, both socially and in terms of policy for nations around the world.

From 1948, the WHO had classified homosexuality as a mental handicap, suggesting that being straight was a necessity to be able to function correctly and live a healthy life as a member of society. But in 1990, this was all to change.

According to May17.org – who have adopted the date to host the annual International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia — this was the day that the WHO announced that it would no longer consider homosexuality to be a mental disorder and would be removing it from the International Classification of Diseases. The decision has allowed for greater steps to be taken toward equality in intervening years while also setting a precedent for the policy and practice of the WHO when it comes to other aspects of sexuality and sexual identity. 

Though the fall of the Berlin Wall appeared to signal the end of the Cold War that had been a constant source of background anxiety for the generations who'd grown up since World War II, the Atomic Age was far from over. Activists and concerned politicians were attempting, at the start of the 1990s, scale down the use of nuclear warheads as deterrents, which had become a common tactic for many developed nations around the world.

In 1991, France finally agreed to sign the "1968 pact," which, according to The New York Times, had already been signed by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and 139 other countries in an effort to limit the use of nuclear weapons. For 23 years, France had been conspicuously absent from the list of signatories, so their eventual agreement was considered a coup by anti-nuclear campaigners. However, in September 1995, France, under the leadership of President Jacques Chirac, began a series of nuclear tests in the South Pacific. The response around the world was one of collective outrage.

In January 1996, after a final explosion that was six times more powerful than the atomic bomb which was detonated over Nagasaki in 1945, Chirac signaled that France was ready to cease nuclear testing and commit to the disarmament of nuclear weapons.

According to a reported from the U.S. Department of State published in 1997, the time had come to deal with what it describes as "one of the greatest thefts by a government in history."

During World War II, it says that Nazi Germany stole an estimated $580 million worth of gold, which, in the '90s, was worth around $5.6 billion. As well as numerous other assets and items, the objects were stolen from both governments and civilians that Nazi Germany had overrun and "from Jewish and non-Jewish victims of the Nazis alike, including Jews murdered in extermination camps, from whom everything was taken down to the gold fillings of their teeth."

By 1997, $68 million of these stolen assets were in the Federal Reserve Bank in New York and the Bank of England, where they had been slowly used to offer restitution to European nations since being handed over to the Allies by Sweden, Switzerland, and other nations after the liberation of Europe in 1945. 

However, an appeal by the World Jewish Congress arguing that these assets were, in part, privately owned possessions convinced the Clinton administration that the distribution of assets should be frozen and the remainder put toward the foundation of a fund to benefit Holocaust survivors.

There were many shocking deaths that made headlines in 1997, often in circumstances that were pored over by the press for months, if not years. The murder of Gianni Versace made headlines around the world. Since then, the fashion empire that he founded and made a household name has been in the hands of his brother Santo and sister Donnatella, meaning that, though we know the Versace name, the story of Gianni's death may be unfamiliar to many of us.

On July 15, 1997, Versace was shot at point-blank range outside his Florida home by 27-year-old serial killer Andrew Cunanan, according to Time. The designer, who was 50 at the time of his death, was the last in a series of five victims Cunanan had murdered between April and July of that year. Cunanan himself was found dead eight days later on a luxury boat not far from the scene of his final killing.

A motive has never been ascertained, though the press at the time concocted several lurid theories, including the idea that the spree was the result of Cunanan being diagnosed as HIV-positive. An autopsy proved that this was not the case. Some outlets have reported that Versace and Cunanan were known to each other, having met in San Fransisco as early as 1990, but the exact nature of their relationship remains a mystery, with many pointing to Cunanan having delusions of grandeur that may have inflated his sense of connection with Versace.

As noted by The Independent, a ride in a cable car while skiing rarely ends in disaster, as scary as the heights might sometimes be. In the case of the small Italian town of Cavalese on February 3, 1998, one sedate journey came to an appalling end, claiming the lives of 20 people.

The area of the Dolomites in which Cavalese is situated had long been used as a military training site for US Air Force fighter pilots, who exploited the rocky landscape to execute drills and perform hairpin maneuvers which replicated the conditions of actual aerial combat. Thirty-year-old Richard Ashby was piloting an outdated military plane known as an EA-4B Prowler along with his navigator and two crew when the plane took a dangerously low flight path of only 300 feet among the hills of the town. During the maneuver, the right wing of the craft severed the two-inch-thick cable of a slow-moving cable car, sending its 20 occupants plummeting 250 feet to the ground.

None survived. The inquiry that followed absolved the crew of blame, with Ashby dodging manslaughter charges in 1999. The U.S. government reimbursed the $60,000 that the Italian government had paid each grieving family for the disaster, adding an extra $5,000 for the burial and necessary repatriation of each of the victims. Today, many of the relatives of those who perished are still seeking justice for what happened.