The 1990s
Five real newspaper headlines from the 1990s, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. This is the decade people are most confident about and most often wrong about, usually by placing things too late.
They run from the week the web opened to the public to the film that swept the Oscars at the end of the decade. Headlines publishes a new five-headline history quiz every day.
Headline one
The Times
1991
Tim Berners-Lee had built it at CERN to help physicists share documents. The first website went live in August, and CERN placed the underlying technology into the public domain two years later, which is the decision that let the web become universal rather than proprietary.
Headline two
The Guardian
1994
Nelson Mandela had been released four years earlier after twenty-seven years in prison. The election was the first in which South Africans of all races could vote, and queues at some polling stations stretched for more than a mile.
Headline three
Los Angeles Times
1995
The verdict was watched live by an estimated 150 million Americans, and long-distance telephone traffic dropped measurably in the minutes surrounding it. A civil jury found him liable for the deaths two years later.
Headline four
The Daily Mirror
1997
The crash happened in the early hours of 31 August in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel. The public reaction in Britain — the flowers outside Kensington Palace, the pressure on the royal family to respond — is still studied as a moment when the national mood visibly shifted.
Headline five
Variety
1998
It was the most expensive film ever made at the time, and widely expected to fail. It held the record for the highest-grossing film for twelve years, until James Cameron beat it himself with Avatar.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
More decades: The 1900s · The 1910s · The 1920s · The 1930s · The 1940s · The 1950s · all challenges