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Top Song(s)
• Sinead O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U
• Madonna - Vogue
• Londonbeat - I've Been Thinking About You
• Roxette - It Must Have Been Love
• Bon Jovi - Blaze of Glory
Top Film(s)
• GoodFellas
• Miller's Crossing
• Edward Scissorhands
• Total Recall
• Back to the Future Part III
Best Selling Book(s)
• Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
• Oh, the Places You’ll Go! - Dr. Seuss
• Possession - A.S. Byatt
• The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
• The Great Hunt - Robert Jordan
Famous Deaths
• January 19 – Arthur Goldberg, Supreme Court justice
• February 19 – Otto E. Neugebauer, Austrian-born American mathematician and historian of science
• March 10 - Michael Stewart, British politician (Foreign Secretary 1965-66, 68-70)
• April 3 - Edna Reindel, Surrealist and American Regionalist painter and sculptor
• May 21 - Mary Victor Bruce, British speedboat pilot, race car driver, and aviator
• June 3 – Robert Noyce, American businessman and inventor
• July 6 - Nathaniel Wyeth, American chemist and inventor (created PET plastic beverage bottle)
• October 29 - William French Smith, American lawyer and former Attorney General of the United States
• November 17 – Robert Hofstadter, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
• December 16 – Douglas Campbell, World War I pilot
Medical/Science/Technology
• Steven Balbus makes his first discovery leading to elucidation of magnetorotational instability.
• Earth-grazing meteoroid of 13 October 1990.
• The term "rewilding" is first used in print.
• Adobe Photoshop 1.0 graphics software, devised by Thomas Knoll, is released.
• Windows 3.0 is shipped by Microsoft.
• The first known web page is written.
• Victor Kolyvagin introduces Euler systems.
• The Human Genome Project is founded.
• The first evidence for the existence of the BRCA gene encoding for a DNA repair enzyme.
• Sue", the best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimen ever found, is discovered in South Dakota.
Political
• January 18 - In Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry is arrested for drug possession in an FBI sting.
• January 24 - Richard Secord is sentenced to two years probation for lying to the United States Congress about the Iran–Contra affair.
• January 31 - President of the United States George H. W. Bush gives his first State of the Union address.
• March 1 - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves a license for the long-delayed Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant.
• March 28 – U.S. President George H. W. Bush posthumously awards Jesse Owens the Congressional Gold Medal.
• April 17–18 – President Bush meets with representatives of 17 countries to discuss global warming and other environmental issues.
• May 19 – The U.S. and the Soviet Union agree to end production of chemical weapons.
• May 30 – President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev begin a four-day summit meeting in Washington, D.C.
• July 26 - President George H. W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act.
• June 1 - President George H. W. Bush and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Chemical Weapons Accord.
National
• January 9–20 – The Space Shuttle Columbia flies STS-32.
• January 22 – Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. is convicted of releasing the Morris worm.
• February 9 – The owners of Major League Baseball announce a lockout because of a salary dispute with players.
• February 25 – A smoking ban takes effect on all domestic U.S. flights of less than six hours.
• March 22 – A jury in Anchorage, Alaska finds Joseph Hazelwood guilty of negligence for his role in the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
• March 25 – In New York City, a fire due to arson at an illegal social club called "Happy Land" kills 87
• April 25 – The Space Shuttle Discovery places the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.
• July – The United States enters the early 1990s recession.
• September 29 – Washington National Cathedral is completed after 83 years of construction.
• October 27 – Congress passes the Clean Air Act of 1990.
Worldwide
• January 1 - Poland becomes the first country in Eastern Europe to begin abolishing its state socialist colonies.
• February 11 – Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town, South Africa, after 27 years behind bars.
• March 1 - A fire at the Sheraton Hotel in Cairo, Egypt, kills 16 people.
• April 24 - West Germany and East Germany agree to merge currency and economies on July 1.
• May 9 – In South Korea, police battle anti-government protesters in Seoul and two other cities.
• June 12 - The Congress of People's Deputies of Russia formally declares its sovereignty.
• July 16 - 1990 Luzon earthquake: An earthquake measuring 7.7 kills more than 2,400 in the Philippines.
• August 2 - Gulf War: Iraq invades Kuwait, eventually leading to the Gulf War.
• September 10 – The first Pizza Hut opens up in the Soviet Union.
• December 16 – Jean-Bertrand Aristide is elected president of Haiti, ending 3 decades of military rule.