Chapter Two examines what then was a deepening national preoccupation with terrorism, fueled by the massive bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, an attack that killed 168 people, including 19 children. It was, and remains, the deadliest act of domestic terror in U.S. history. Within weeks of the Oklahoma City bombing, a portion of Pennsylvania Avenue—the so-called “Main Street” of America—was closed to vehicular traffic near the White House, signaling the rise of security-related restrictions intended to thwart the terrorist threat. Such reactions and restrictions, I write in 1995, “have since become more common, more intrusive, more stringent, and perhaps even more accepted.”

Chapter Three takes up the sensational “Trial of the Century,” when O.J. Simpson answered to charges that he had slashed to death his former wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. The Simpson trial, I write, “stretched across much of the year, not unlike an indelible stain.” Simpson, a former star football player, was acquitted and set free, but never won redemption of his public persona. Ironically, I note, it was the trial’s most tedious stretches that produced its “most lasting contribution: the Simpson case introduced into popular consciousness the decisive potential of forensic DNA evidence in criminal investigations and legal proceedings.”

Chapter Four revisits the U.S.-brokered peace talks that brought an end to the vicious war in Bosnia, the deadliest and most appalling conflict in Europe since the time of the Nazis. Crafting a fragile peace in the Balkans — negotiators met for three weeks at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base near Dayton, Ohio — gave rise to a sense of American hubris in foreign affairs, hubris that was tragically misapplied not many years later, following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.