Influential Men Of The 1990s
The 10 Greatest Men Of The '90sWith the Cold War finally and definitively over (symbolized by Boris Yeltsin's visit to a Moscow McDonald's), the United States experienced its longest period of peacetime economic expansion in its history throughout the 1990s. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose from under 4,000 in 1991 to crest at 10,000 in 1999. The decade also saw the popularization of new media (with the invention of the World Wide Web) and the reinvention of old genres.
This list of influential men of the 1990s accounts for a few independent films, two convention-defying television shows, and the musical face of a generation. Technology became an increasingly visible facet of public culture, whether benign (the popularization of cell phones), contentious (the first cloning of a mammal) or blown wildly out of proportion (the suspicion that Y2K problems would lead to worldwide havoc and the disintegration of society).
Our list of influential men of the 1990s is ranked by the degree to which they influenced their respective fields, impacted the popular consciousness, or shaped major world events. Some lived only a few years in the '90s, while others had an unusually problematic decade (though one that made them far more visible in popular culture).