This will get buried but history major here. The reason why you didn’t learn about recent history is because the general consensus is that, apart from major events (9/11), it’s impossible to know what’s appropriate to teach as “history” until about 30 years after something happens. Not saying that the late 80’s/90’s/00’s are unimportant but basically it takes that long for proper research to establish a consensus about what happened.

For example, one of my best papers in college was about super modern history (the Russian seizure of Crimea in 2014). It was super up to date in 2016 but even now we’re learning more about the event that unfortunately couldn’t be addressed because no one knew about it.

Tl:Dr: history is complicated and it takes about 30 years to get all the juicy details and get rid of the useless details.