Welcome to The 1995 Blog

Welcome to The 1995 Blog, a site that will call attention to and revisit the important moments of an exceptional year.

The blog has another mission, that of promoting my forthcoming book, 1995: The Year the Future Began, to be published by the University of California Press. The book may be ordered through Amazon.com, the retailing giant that began selling books online in mid-July 1995.

The chapters of 1995 include: “The Year of the Internet,” which considers the emergence of the World Wide Web into mainstream consciousness; “Terror in the heartland,” which discusses the Oklahoma City bombing and its consequences; “O.J., DNA, and the ‘Trial of the Century,” which takes up the sensational, months-long double-murder trial of O.J. Simpson; “Peace at Dayton and the ‘hubris bubble,'” which revisits the U.S.-brokered peace talks that ended the vicious war in Bosnia, and “Clinton meets Lewinsky,” which addresses the origins and effects of the sex-and-lies scandal that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

As I write in 1995, these events and moments “were profound in their respective ways and, taken together, they define a watershed year at the cusp of the millennium. Nineteen ninety-five in many ways effectively marked the close of the one century, and the start of another.”

I further write about 1995:

“It is striking how a sense of the improbable often flavored the year and characterized its watershed moments. Oklahoma City was an utterly improbable setting for an attack of domestic terrorism of unprecedented dimension. Dayton, Ohio, was an improbable venue for weeks of multiparty negotiations that concluded by ending the faraway war in Bosnia. The private study and secluded hallway off the Oval Office at the White House were the improbable hiding places for Clinton’s dalliance” with a 22-year-old intern named Monica Lewinsky.

“The improbable,” I add, “was a constant of the year.”

1995 is my sixth book. I have also written Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, an award-winning work that the University of California Press brought out in 2010. The companion blog to Getting It Wrong is Media Myth Alert

My other books are:  The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms (2006); The Spanish-American War: American Wars and the Media in Primary Documents (2005); Yellow Journalism: Puncturing the Myths, Defining the Legacies (2001), and The Emergent Independent Press in Benin and Cote d’Ivoire: From Voice of the State to Advocate of Democracy (1998).

Official publication date for 1995 was January 2, 2015.

WJC