December 5, 1996

By the winter of 1996, Clinton was in the White House and the federal minimum wage stood at $4.75/hr — the United States was sending troops to Bosnia as part of a NATO peacekeeping mission following the Dayton Peace Accords. On television, "ER" was the country's top-rated drama while John Grisham's "The Runaway Jury" held the number one spot on the fiction bestseller list, and Americans were heading to theaters to see "12 Monkeys." The Chicago Bulls, led by Michael Jordan, had just claimed the NBA championship that year, and in December the United Nations Security Council elected Kofi Annan of Ghana as the next Secretary-General of the UN, making him the first sub-Saharan African to hold the position.