1987
Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate
Standing with the Berlin Wall behind him, Ronald Reagan delivered a line his State Department had tried to cut: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It sounded at the time like the usual Cold War theatrics. Twenty-nine months later the wall was being chipped into souvenirs, and Reagan's line had become a prophecy.
INF Treaty signed
Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty at the White House eliminating an entire class of nuclear weapons, the intermediate-range missiles stationed in Europe and Asia. For the first time in the nuclear age, the superpowers were destroying warheads rather than just limiting them. The arms race had finally begun to run in reverse.
First intifada begins
After an Israeli truck killed four Palestinian workers in Gaza, demonstrations spread through the occupied territories like wildfire. Stones and Molotov cocktails met Israeli bullets and tear gas. The uprising ran for six years, transformed Palestinian politics by empowering a new generation, made Yitzhak Rabin say they were a problem that required a political solution, and helped force the Oslo Accords of 1993.
Black Monday crash
On a single day the Dow Jones lost twenty-two point six percent, the largest percentage drop in its history. The crash spread around the world as electronic trading propagated selling. The system held together; the Fed pumped in liquidity; no depression followed. But the nineteen-eighties boom had received a warning it largely ignored.
Simpsons debut on Tracey Ullman Show
Matt Groening's animated family of yellow misfits first appeared as one-minute interstitials on The Tracey Ullman Show, crude sketches dashed off on a legal pad. Two years later they would get their own prime-time half-hour on Fox, reviving prime-time animation for adults and becoming the longest-running scripted show in American television history, outlasting every prediction of its demise. D'oh.