Watching the 2010s Become History

At the start of 2010, Barack Obama was just 11 months into his presidency. The recovery from the Great Recession was in its early stages. The Marvel cinematic universe consisted of Iron Man and Edward Norton’s Hulk. Less than 20 percent of Americans owned smartphones.

It’s been a long decade.

In three years at The Atlantic, in a role that often has me poking around our archive, I’ve come to understand American history through the stories told in the magazine as that history was unfolding. The 1850s focused readers’ attention on financial panic and standoffs over slavery; the 1880s aroused concerns about materialism and labor conditions; the 1910s were marked by contentious debates about the free press, women’s suffrage, and the nature of war.

How will the 2010s be remembered? Looking back through the articles The Atlantic published over the past 10 years—a period during which it dramatically expanded its web presence, meaning that for the first time in the publication’s history, the news was covered as it happened—I rediscovered a decade that shocked the world, both day by day and now, looking back.

The myth of a post-racial America has been shattered.

Obama’s election in 2008 prompted speculation from some academics and news analysts that American politics had transcended considerations of race and entered a new era. But by 2010, that idea had already been shaken by the vocal birther movement (prominently promoted by Donald Trump), and would be all but obliterated by the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and the public outcry that followed.

In the September 2012 issue, Ta-Nehisi Coates explored the irony of the racial dynamics of Obama’s presidency. “Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House,” he observed, “but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.”

Atlantic writers have since reported in-depth on the entrenched racial disparities in homicide rates, debt burdens, incarceration, and overall mortality in America. And the magazine has detailed the ascent of individual white supremacists—as well as a broader ethno-nationalist coalition that helped bring Donald Trump, in all his overt bigotry, to power in 2016.

What to read:

“Black children in the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not