Jeffrey Daniel Holden, Jr

Elizabeth II (21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022), became head of the Commonwealth and queen regnant of seven independent Commonwealth countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon on 6 Feb 1952.

She reigned through major constitutional changes, such as devolution in the UK, Canadian patriation, and the decolonisation of Africa. Her many historic visits and meetings include a state visit to the Republic of Ireland and visits to or from five popes. Significant events have included her coronation in 1953 and the celebrations of her Silver, Golden, and Diamond Jubilees in 1977, 2002, and 2012 respectively. In 2017, she became the first British monarch to reach a Sapphire Jubilee. She is the longest-lived and longest-reigning British monarch as well as the world's longest-reigning queen regnant and female head of state, the oldest and longest-reigning monarch and the longest-serving head of state.

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher, (née Roberts; 13 October 1925 – 8 April 2013) was a British stateswoman who served as Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990. She was the longest-serving British prime minister of the 20th century and the first woman to hold that office. A Soviet journalist dubbed her "The 'Iron Lady'", a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high unemployment and Britain's struggles in the wake of the Winter of Discontent and an ongoing recession. Her policies emphasised deregulation, flexible labour markets, privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power of trade unions. Her popularity waned amid recession and rising unemployment, but victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support. She survived an assassination attempt in the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984.

Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge ("poll tax") was widely unpopular, and her views on the European Community were not shared by others in her Cabinet. She resigned in November 1990, after a leadership challenge.

Ronald Wilson Reagan (February 6, 1911 – June 5, 2004) was an American politician who served as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989. Prior to his presidency, he was a Hollywood actor and union leader before serving as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975. Soon after taking office, Reagan began implementing sweeping new political and economic initiatives. His supply-side economic policies, dubbed "Reaganomics", advocated tax rate reduction to spur economic growth, economic deregulation, and reduction in government spending. In his first term he survived an assassination attempt, spurred the War on Drugs, and fought public sector labor.

Foreign affairs dominated his second term, including ending the Cold War, the bombing of Libya, the Iran–Iraq War, and the Iran–Contra affair. He transitioned Cold War policy from détente to rollback by escalating an arms race with the USSR while engaging in talks with Gorbachev. The talks culminated in the INF Treaty, which shrank both countries' nuclear arsenals.

Martin Brian Mulroney (born March 20, 1939) is a Canadian politician who served as the 18th prime minister of Canada from September 17, 1984, to June 25, 1993.

His tenure as prime minister was marked by the introduction of major economic reforms, such as the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and the Goods and Services Tax, and the rejection of constitutional reforms such as the Meech Lake Accord and the Charlottetown Accord. Prior to his political career, he was a prominent lawyer and businessman in Montreal.

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster was a fatal incident on January 28, 1986, in the United States space program where the Space Shuttle Challenger (OV-099) broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The spacecraft disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:39 a.m. EST (16:39 UTC).

The Chernobyl disaster was a catastrophic nuclear accident. It occurred on 25–26 April 1986 in the No. 4 light water graphite moderated reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant near the now-abandoned town of Pripyat, in northern Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Soviet Union, approximately 104 km (65 mi) north of Kiev.

The accident is considered the most disastrous nuclear power plant accident in history, both in terms of cost and casualties. It is one of only two nuclear energy accidents classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011.

Pan Am Flight 103 was a scheduled flight from Frankfurt to Detroit via London. The aircraft on the transatlantic leg was destroyed by a bomb, killing 243 passengers and 16 crew. Sections crashed onto Lockerbie, killing 11. Consequently the event is referred to as the Lockerbie Bombing. Eventually, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was jailed for life for 270 counts of murder. In August 2009, he was released after being diagnosed with prostate cancer

The World Wide Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet.

English scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.

George Herbert Walker Bush (June 12, 1924 – November 30, 2018) was an American politician who served as the 41st president of the United States from 1989 to 1993.

Foreign policy drove the Bush presidency; military operations were conducted in Panama and the Persian Gulf, the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the Soviet Union dissolved two years later. Bush also signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which created a trade bloc consisting of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Domestically, Bush reneged on a 1988 campaign promise and signed a bill to increase taxes. He lost the 1992 presidential election to Democrat Bill Clinton following an economic recession and the decreased importance of foreign policy in a post–Cold War political climate.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall began the evening of 9 November 1989 and continued over the following days and weeks, with people using various tools to chip off souvenirs, demolishing lengthy parts in the process, and creating several unofficial border crossings. Television coverage of citizens demolishing sections of the Wall on 9 November was soon followed by the East German regime announcing ten new border crossings, including the historically significant locations of Potsdamer Platz, Glienicker Brücke, and Bernauer Straße. Crowds gathered on both sides of the historic crossings waiting for hours to cheer the bulldozers that tore down portions of the Wall to reconnect the divided roads.

The Gulf War (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991), codenamed Operation Desert Shield (2 August 1990 – 17 January 1991) for operations leading to the buildup of troops and defense of Saudi Arabia and Operation Desert Storm (17 January 1991 – 28 February 1991) in its combat phase, was a war waged by coalition forces from 35 nations led by the United States against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait arising from oil pricing and production disputes.

The Iraqi Army's occupation of Kuwait began 2 August 1990 and brought immediate economic sanctions against Iraq by members of the UN Security Council. Together with the UK's prime minister Margaret Thatcher, George H W Bush deployed US forces into Saudi Arabia, and urged other countries to send their own forces to the scene. An array of nations joined the coalition, forming the largest military alliance since World War II. The great majority of the coalition's military forces were from the US, with Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom and Egypt as leading contributors, in that order.

Sir John Major (born 29 March 1943) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997.

Major became Prime Minister after Thatcher's reluctant resignation in November 1990. He presided over British participation in the Gulf War in March 1991, and negotiated the Maastricht Treaty in December 1991. Heled the Conservatives to a record fourth consecutive electoral victory, winning the most votes in British electoral history at the 1992 general election, albeit with a reduced majority in the House of Commons. Shortly after this his government was responsible for British exit from the ERM after Black Wednesday on 16 September 1992. This event led to a loss of confidence in Conservative economic policies and Major was never able to achieve a lead in opinion polls again.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union occurred on 26 December 1991, officially granting self-governing independence to the Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), although five of the signatories ratified it much later or did not do so at all. On the previous day, 25 December, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the eighth and final leader of the USSR, resigned, declared his office extinct and handed over its powers to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. At 7:32 pm the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time.

Previously, from August to December all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had either seceded from the union or at the very least denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR. The Revolutions of 1989 and the dissolution of the USSR also marked the end of the Cold War.

William Jefferson Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III;) (b. August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.

Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history and signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement . In 1996, Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to a second full term. In 1998, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice following allegations that he committed perjury and obstructed justice to conceal an affair he had with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year old White House intern. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in 1999 and completed his term in office.

During the last three years of Clinton's presidency, the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus, the first such surplus since 1969. In foreign policy, Clinton ordered U.S. military intervention in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, signed the Iraq Liberation Act in opposition to Saddam Hussein, participated in the 2000 Camp David Summit to advance the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, and assisted the Northern Ireland peace process.Clinton has continually scored high in the historical rankings of US presidents, consistently placing in the top third.

Avril Phaedra Douglas "Kim" Campbell (born March 10, 1947) is a Canadian politician, diplomat, lawyer and writer who served as the 19th prime minister of Canada from June 25, 1993 to November 4, 1993. Campbell was the first female prime minister of Canada.

Campbell was also the first baby boomer to hold that office, and the only Prime Minister born in British Columbia. She is Canada's third-shortest serving Prime Minister at 132 days in office. She currently is the chairperson for Canada's Supreme Court Advisory Board.

Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien (born January 11, 1934) is a Canadian politician who served as the 20th prime minister of Canada from November 4, 1993, to December 12, 2003.

He became leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1990, and led the party to a majority government in the 1993 federal election. He was reelected with further majorities in 1997 and 2000.

Chrétien was strongly opposed to the Quebec sovereignty movement and supported official bilingualism and multiculturalism. He won a narrow victory as leader of the federalist camp in the 1995 Quebec referendum, and then pioneered the Clarity Act to avoid ambiguity in future referendum questions. He also advanced the Youth Criminal Justice Act in Parliament. Although his popularity and that of the Liberal Party were seemingly unchallenged for three consecutive federal elections, he became subject to various political controversies in the later years of his prime-ministership. He was accused of inappropriate behaviour in the Sponsorship scandal, although he has consistently denied any wrongdoing. He also became embroiled in a protracted struggle within the Liberal Party against long-time political rival Paul Martin. He retired as prime minister in December 2003

The People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson was a criminal trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court in which former National Football League (NFL) player, broadcaster and actor O. J. Simpson was tried and acquitted for the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. The trial is often characterized as the trial of the century because of its international publicity, and has been described as the "most publicized" criminal trial in human history.

The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic terrorist truck bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, United States, on April 19, 1995. Perpetrated by two anti-government extremists, the bombing happened at 9:02 a.m. and killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed more than one-third of the building, which had to be demolished. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, and destroyed 86 cars, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage.

The Red River flood of 1997 in the United States was a major flood that occurred in April 1997, along the Red River of the North in North Dakota and Minnesota. The flood reached throughout the Red River Valley, affecting the cities of Fargo, Moorhead, and Winnipeg, while Grand Forks and East Grand Forks received the most damage, where floodwaters reached over 3 miles (5 km) inland, inundating virtually everything in the twin communities.Total damages for the Red River region were US$3.5 billion. Per weather.gov, there were 118 flood-related deaths.

Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007. During his first term as Prime Minister, his government oversaw a large increase in public spending and introduced the National Minimum Wage Act, Human Rights Act, and Freedom of Information Act. His government also held referendums in which the Scottish and Welsh electorates voted in favour of devolved administration. In Northern Ireland, Blair was involved in negotiating the Good Friday Agreement.

Blair supported the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, and ensured that the British Armed Forces participated in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and, more controversially, the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair has faced criticism for his role in the invasion of Iraq, including calls for having him tried for war crimes and waging a war of aggression; in 2016, the Iraq Inquiry criticised his actions and described the invasion as unjustified and unnecessary.

In the early hours of 31 August 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from injuries sustained earlier that day in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France. Dodi Fayed, Diana's partner, and Henri Paul, their chauffeur, were found dead inside the car. Her bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, who was seriously injured, was the lone survivor of the crash.

Diana was 36 years old when she died. Her death sparked an unprecedented outpouring of public grief in the United Kingdom and worldwide, and her televised funeral was watched by an estimated 2.5 billion people. The royal family were criticised in the press for their reaction to Diana's death. Public interest in Diana has remained high and she has retained regular press coverage in the decades since her death.

On April 20, 1999, a school shooting and attempted bombing occurred at Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado, United States. The perpetrators murdered 12 students and one teacher. 10 students were killed in the school library.21 additional people were injured by gunshots, and gunfire was also exchanged with the police. Another three people were injured trying to escape. At the time, it was the deadliest high school shooting in U.S. history. The shooting has inspired dozens of copycat killings, dubbed the Columbine effect, including many deadlier shootings across the world. The word "Columbine" has become a byword for school shootings. The motive remains inconclusive. Columbine has resulted in an increased emphasis on school security with zero tolerance policies. Debates and moral panic were sparked over American gun culture and gun control laws, high school cliques, subcultures (e.g. goths), outcasts, and school bullying, as well as teenage use of pharmaceutical antidepressants, the internet, and violence in video games and movies.

The first release of The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding or TNG - a genealogy software application installed in a web server - by Darrin Lythgoe - without which you wouldn't be reading this timeline.

George Walker Bush (born July 6, 1946) is an American politician and businessman who served as the 43rd president of the United States from 2001 to 2009. He is only the second president to assume the nation's highest office after his father, following the footsteps of John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams.

The September 11 terrorist attacks occurred eight months into Bush's first term. Bush responded with what became known as the Bush Doctrine: launching a "War on Terror", an international military campaign that included the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003. His tenure included national debates on immigration, Social Security, electronic surveillance, and torture. In the 2004 presidential race, Bush defeated Democratic Senator John Kerry in another relatively close election. After his re-election, Bush received increasingly heated criticism from across the political spectrum for his handling of the Iraq War.

The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated Islamist suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001. That morning, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners scheduled to travel from the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions of the East Coast to California. The hijackers crashed the first two planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, two of the world's five tallest buildings at the time, and aimed the next two flights toward targets in or near Washington, D.C., in an attack on the nation's capital. The third team succeeded in crashing into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense in Arlington County, Virginia, while the fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania following a passenger revolt. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and instigated the multi-decade global war on terror.

The first impact was that of American Airlines Flight 11, which the terrorist ringleader crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan at 8:46 a.m. Sixteen minutes later, at 9:03, the World Trade Center's South Tower was hit by United Airlines Flight 175. Both 110-story skyscrapers collapsed within an hour and forty-one minutes, bringing about the destruction of the remaining five structures in the WTC complex and damaging or destroying nearby buildings. A third flight, American Airlines Flight 77, crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., causing a partial collapse. The fourth and final flight, United Airlines Flight 93, flew in the direction of the capital. Alerted to the previous attacks, the passengers retaliated in an attempt to take control of the aircraft, forcing the hijackers to crash the plane in a Stonycreek Township field, near Indian Lake and Shanksville, at 10:03 a.m. Investigators determined that Flight 93's target was either the United States Capitol or the White House.

The War in Afghanistan followed the US invasion of Afghanistan of 7 October 2001. The US was initially supported by the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia and later by a coalition of over 40 countries, including all NATO members. The war's public aims were to dismantle al-Qaeda and to deny it a safe base of operations in Afghanistan by removing the Taliban from power. The War in Afghanistan is the second longest war in US history, behind the Vietnam War.

In May 2012, NATO leaders commended an exit strategy for withdrawing their forces. On 28 December 2014, NATO formally ended ISAF combat operations in Afghanistan and officially transferred full security responsibility to the Afghan government. The NATO-led Operation Resolute Support was formed the same day as a successor to ISAF. As of May 2017, over 13,000 foreign troops remain in Afghanistan without any formal plans to withdraw, and continue their fight against the Taliban, which remains by far the largest single group fighting against the Afghan government and foreign troops,

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the war. Over 4,000 ISAF soldiers and civilian contractors, over 15,000 Afghan national security forces were killed, as well as over 31,000 civilians.

The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. An estimated 151-600,000 Iraqis were killed in the first 3–4 years of conflict.

Paul Edgar Philippe Martin (born August 28, 1938) is a Canadian politician who served as the 21st prime minister of Canada from December 12, 2003, to February 6, 2006.

On November 14, 2003, Martin succeeded Jean Chrétien as leader of the Liberal Party and became prime minister on December 12, 2003. After the 2004 election, his Liberal Party retained power, although only as a minority government. Forced by a confidence vote to call the 2006 general election, which he lost.

The 7 July 2005 London bombings, (7/7) were a coordinated terrorist attacks targetting commuters on the public transport system during morning rush hour. Four Islamic terrorists detonated three bombs aboard London Underground and a fourth on a bus. Fifty-two people of eighteen nationalities, all UK residents, were killed, and over 700 injured, making it Britain's deadliest terrorist incident since the Lockerbie Bombing.

Hurricane Katrina was a devastating Category 5 Atlantic hurricane that caused 1,836 fatalities and damage estimated between $97.4 billion to $145.5 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. Katrina was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season.

The largest loss of life in Hurricane Katrina was due to flooding caused by engineering flaws in the flood protection system, particularly the levee around the city of New Orleans. Eventually, 80% of the city, as well as large areas in neighboring parishes, were flooded for weeks. The flooding destroyed most of New Orleans's transportation and communication facilities, leaving tens of thousands of people who did not evacuate the city prior to landfall with little access to food, shelter, and other basic necessities.

On January 4, 2023, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) updated the Katrina fatality data based on a report by Rappaport (2014) which reduced the number from an estimated 1,833 to 1,392. The same NHC report also revised the total damage estimate keeping Hurricane Katrina as the costliest storm ever––$190 billion according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information.

Stephen Joseph Harper (born April 30, 1959) is a Canadian economist, entrepreneur, and retired politician who served as the 22nd prime minister of Canada, from February 6, 2006, to November 4, 2015.

Harper was the first Canadian Prime Minister to come from the modern Conservative Party of Canada. In 2003, he reached an agreement with Progressive Conservative leader Peter MacKay for the merger of their two parties to form the Conservative Party of Canada. He was elected as the party's first leader, in March 2004.

The 2006 federal election resulted in a minority government led by the Conservative Party with Harper becoming the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada. By proportion of seats, this was Canada's smallest minority government since Confederation. Despite this, it was the longest-serving minority government overall. In the 2008 federal election, the Conservative Party won a stronger minority. The 40th Canadian Parliament was dissolved in March 2011, after a no-confidence vote that deemed the Cabinet to be in contempt of parliament. In the federal election that followed, the Conservatives won a majority government, the first since the 2000 federal election; the party won 166 seats, an increase of 23 seats from the October 2008 election.

James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is a British politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Labour Party from 2007 to 2010.

After initial rises in opinion polls following Brown becoming Prime Minister, Labour's popularity declined with the onset of a recession in 2008. Labour lost 91 seats in the House of Commons at the 2010 general election, the party's biggest loss of seats in a single general election since 1931, making the Conservatives the largest party in a hung parliament. Brown remained in office as Labour negotiated to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats but his attempts to retain power failed and on 11 May, he officially resigned as Prime Minister.

iPhone is a line of smartphones produced by Apple Inc. that use Apple's own iOS mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007. Since then, Apple has annually released new iPhone models and iOS updates. As of November 1, 2018, more than 2.2 billion iPhones had been sold. As of 2022, the iPhone accounts for 15.6% of global smartphone market share.

The iPhone is one of the two largest smartphone platforms in the world alongside Android, and is a large part of the luxury market. The iPhone has generated large profits for Apple, making it one of the world's most valuable publicly traded companies. The first-generation iPhone was described as a "revolution" for the mobile phone industry and subsequent models have also garnered praise. The iPhone has been credited with popularizing the smartphone and slate form factor, and with creating a large market for smartphone apps, or "app economy".

The Great Recession was a period of general economic decline observed in world markets during the late 2000s and early 2010s. The scale and timing of the recession varied from country to country. The International Monetary Fund concluded that the overall impact was the most severe since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The Great Recession stemmed from the collapse of the United States real-estate market, in relation to the financial crisis of 2007 to 2008 and U.S. subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 to 2009, though policies of other nations contributed also. The Great Recession resulted in the scarcity of valuable assets in the market economy and the collapse of the financial sector (banks) in the world economy. Some banks were bailed out by their governments.

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected to the presidency. Nine months later, he was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Obama signed many landmark bills into law. The main reforms were the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (often referred to as "Obamacare.") He increased troop levels in Afghanistan and ordered military involvement in Libya in opposition to Muammar Gaddafi. He also ordered the military operations that killed Osama bin Laden.

During his second term, he promoted inclusiveness for LGBT Americans and gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. In foreign policy, he ordered military intervention in Iraq in response to gains made by ISIL, promoted discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, initiated sanctions against Russia following the invasion in Ukraine and after Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, and normalized relations with Cuba. During his terms in office, America's reputation in global polling significantly improved.

A December 2018 Gallup poll found Obama to be the most admired man in America for an unprecedented 11th consecutive year, although Dwight D. Eisenhower was selected most admired in twelve non-consecutive years.