The women of U.S. soccer lead the way.

An outcry over the treatment of immigrant families at the border.

Trump is said to expose secrets to Russians.

Trump is sworn in as the 45th president.

Same-sex marriage is the law of the land.

The last convoy of U.S. troops leaves Iraq.

A private spacecraft returns from orbit for the first time.

The U.S. doubles down in Afghanistan.

A fierce earthquake in Haiti. Citizens United changes the political game. The U.S. doubles down in Afghanistan. The Affordable Care Act becomes law. Team Canada's hockey gold. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill. A volcano awakens in Iceland. Twin bombings in Moscow's subway. A coal mining disaster in West Virginia. Russia and U.S. sign a nuclear arms pact. ‘Chemical Ali’ is executed in Iraq. A car bomb in Times Square. LeBron James spurns the Cavs. Trapped miners in Chile. The combat mission ends in Iraq. WikiLeaks cache uncloaks U.S. diplomacy. A private spacecraft returns from orbit for the first time. A congresswoman is shot in a Tucson rampage. An uprising in Tunisia. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. SEAL Team 6 kills Osama bin Laden. Oprah Winfrey signs off. A fugitive in the Bosnian genocide is captured. Anthony Weiner resigns. Casey Anthony is acquitted. Independence for South Sudan. Derek Jeter's 3,000th hit. A scandal shutters a British tabloid. The Shuttle Atlantis ends an era in space. The Norway attacks. A quake leaves cracks in the Washington Monument. Operation Fast and Furious. An American-born cleric is killed in Yemen. Amanda Knox goes free. Muammar al-Qaddafi's demise. A scandal at Penn State. Occupy Wall Street. The last convoy of U.S. troops leaves Iraq. Kim Jong-un succeeds his father. A cruise ship runs aground in Italy. A deadly prison fire in Honduras. Trayvon Martin's death polarizes the nation. Vladimir Putin extends his power. A viral video of a vicious African warlord. Julian Assange's bid for asylum. LeBron James leads the Miami Heat to victory. The Higgs boson. The Syrian crisis is classified as a civil war. A mass shooting at a Colorado moviehouse. The London Olympics. A rover explores Mars. The Afghan war claims its 2,000th U.S. service member. Members of Pussy Riot are imprisoned. Obama vs. Romney. Hurricane Sandy. A divided nation gives Obama more time. Xi Jinping rises to power in China. The Sandy Hook massacre. Lance Armstrong comes clean. The Benghazi hearings. Benedict XVI resigns, and Francis is embraced. A meteor explodes over Russia. A soldier admits to providing files to WikiLeaks. Hugo Chávez dies. The Boston Marathon bombing. A Bangladesh factory collapse. Three captives are freed in Cleveland. A tornado devastates Oklahoma. Edward Snowden admits leaking secrets. A high-wire canyon walk. 19 firefighters die in Arizona. Mohamed Morsi is ousted in Egypt. Detroit declares bankruptcy. A high-speed train derails in Spain. Jeff Bezos buys The Washington Post. 13 baseball players are suspended for doping. Another suspected chemical attack in Syria. A concussion lawsuit vs. the N.F.L. Gunmen storm a mall in Kenya. A 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida. An incredible comeback at America's Cup. Migrants die as burning boat capsizes off Italy. 1 World Trade Center opens. Nelson Mandela dies at 95. The Sochi Olympics. G.M.'s faulty ignition switch. Ukraine's president flees. El Chapo is captured. Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanishes. Russia annexes Crimea. Mudslides in Washington State. Boko Haram kidnaps hundreds of Nigerian girls. Hundreds die in South Korean ferry disaster. An avalanche on Mount Everest. Narendra Modi becomes India's premier. Bowe Bergdahl comes home. ISIS takes Mosul. A journalist is beheaded. Israel invades Gaza. The downing of Flight 17. Ebola in Africa. A police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., fuels a movement. A punch sinks an N.F.L. star. The fallout from a Bill Cosby joke. Landing on a comet. A thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations. The Charlie Hebdo attack. The Buckeyes win big. King Abdullah, Saudia Arabia's reformer, dies. The Arab world unites against a vicious murder. A ‘deliberate’ fatal plane crash. A video reignites the debate on police tactics. Freddie Gray's death rattles Baltimore. A humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean. An earthquake devastates Nepal. The wreck of Amtrak 188. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. Hate and heartache at a black church. Donald Trump's bid for the presidency. A drug kingpin temporarily slips away. The Iran nuclear deal. An emissions scandal for Volkswagen. A black actress breaks down a barrier. A House speaker is undone. U.S. bombs fall on an Afghan hospital. A Paris concert becomes a hostage scene. A couple open fire in San Bernadino. The Paris climate accord. An armed flare-up at an Oregon refuge. The Zika outbreak. Flint's water crisis. An ill-fated Supreme Court nomination. Bombings paralyze Brussels. The Panama Papers. Rodrigo Duterte takes power in the Philippines. The Pulse nightclub massacre. Britain votes to leave the E.U. Two black men, two police killings. Five Dallas officers are killed by a sniper. A misfit turns a truck into a tank in France. A military coup fails in Turkey. The G.O.P. passes the torch to Trump. Roger Ailes's downfall at Fox News. The Rio Olympics. A bomb blast in Manhattan. Chaos in Charlotte after a black man's killing. The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape surfaces. Hacked emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign. A hostile presidential debate. The F.B.I. reopens the Clinton email investigation. The Chicago Cubs end a 108-year drought. Trump is elected in a stunning upset. Fidel Castro is dead. A deadly warehouse fire in California. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president. False claims about the inauguration. Women nationwide rally for their rights. A travel ban for predominantely Muslim countries. A partisan showdown over a Supreme Court pick. A Super Bowl comeback for the ages. The national security adviser resigns. War consumes South Sudan. An attack near the British Parliament. St. Petersburg is rocked by a subway bombing. The U.S. launches missiles into Syria. Dragging a passenger sets off a crisis at United. Bill O'Reilly is forced out at Fox News. France elects Emmanuel Macron. Hackers hit dozens of countries. Trump fires James Comey. Trump is said to expose secrets to Russians. A special counsel is named in the Russia inquiry. A vow to withdraw from the Paris climate pact. In testimony, James Comey condemns Trump's ‘lies.’ A congressman is shot on a baseball field. The Grenfell Tower fire. The rise of a Saudi prince upends tradition. Putin denies election interference; Trump believes him. Iraqi forces reclaim Mosul. A dramatic thumbs-down saves the health law. Trump blames ‘both sides’ for Charlotesville violence. A van plows into pedestrians in Barcelona. Steve Bannon leaves the White House. A total solar eclipse awes the nation. Desperate Rohingya flee Myanmar. Hurricane Harvey submerges Houston. Caribbean islands are crumpled by Hurricane Irma. Hurricane Maria leaves Puerto Rico in ruins. A surge in athlete activism. Harvey Weinstein is fired, igniting the #MeToo movement. 8 die in Manhattan truck attack. Carnage at a rural Texas church. Trump's marathon tour of Asia. A ruthless attack at a mosque in Egypt. Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel's capital. A $1.5 trillion tax overhaul. A second year of the Trump presidency. Gymnasts speak out. An Iraqi city moves forward. A gunman takes 17 lives at a Florida high school. The terrible reach of Boko Haram. A gathering for gun control. Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs. An outcry over the treatment of immigrant families at the border. A Trump-Kim meeting. A new nominee for the Supreme Court. A world riveted by soccer. Lost: The Queen of Soul. Senator John McCain dies. Wildfires in California. The Tree of Life synagogue massacre. Democrats take back the House. A combative meeting at the White House. Women wield power in Congress. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis rages on. A migration surge from Cenral America. Merciless cold lingers in the Midwest. A clap goes viral. A standoff in Venezuela. A second Boeing jetliner crashes. Twin mosque attacks in New Zealand. The Mueller report is released, and redacted. A rapper is slain in Los Angeles. The first image of a black hole. A fire mauls Notre-Dame cathedal. Easter suicide bombings in Sri Lanka. An Ebola outbreak in Congo. Venezuela's economy ignites a crisis. A crowded field of 2020 Democrats. Trump steps into North Korea. An image captures migrants' desperate journey. Protests boil over in Hong Kong. The women of U.S. soccer lead the way. The unraveling of Jeffrey Epstein. Europe suffers a heat wave. A massacre at a Walmart in Texas. 9 people in Dayton are killed in seconds. Hurricane Dorian batters the Bahamas. The Amazon rainforest burns. A French rebellion turns violent. Chile is rocked by unrest. A Mormon family's terror in Mexico. An impeachmet inquiry by Congress.

The New York Times pored over 10 years of images, of moments both fresh and faded, to tell the story of the past decade. A lot has happened.

Scroll left and right to explore the image

By Joseph Kahn, managing editor

The image shows a rebel fighter in Libya thrusting his Kalashnikov straight into the air as a truck-mounted rocket fires toward forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator. It was the start of 2011, the heady early days of the Arab Spring. The photo is heroic. It is also foreboding.

A short time after that image was shot, Colonel el-Qaddafi was dead, a dictator removed and a popular uprising triumphant. But any celebration was fleeting. The photographer, Chris Hondros, died tragically covering the indiscriminate and interminable war there. The brief, flickering notion that the revolutions of the Arab Spring would herald a new era of openness and representative democracy in the world vanished quickly as well.

Instead, it now seems clear, the 2010s will be remembered as a decade of unceasing upheaval. The impulse to overthrow the entrenched elite reached every continent, sometimes with violent uprisings, sometimes with populist insurgencies that shook the institutions of leading democracies. As the decade closes out, it seems clear that a long period of fission, defined by the fraying of norms, the weakening of traditional political parties and the upending of post-Cold War alliances, has yet to fully run its course.

There have been other decades in history in which a revolutionary fervor or populist unrest went viral. A wave of uprisings against monarchy shook Europe in the 1840s. Indebted farmers in the United States revolted against the railroad barons and the Eastern elites in the 1890s. Mass protests at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s overthrew governments or transformed much of the communist world.

The unrest of the 2010s seems more varied and more global. But it is not difficult to imagine that the period will be remembered by history as another fateful era of populist tumult.

Few of the photographers illustrating the stories of the day could have seen that coming 10 years ago. Yet many of the most memorable images document its spread. During the early days of the antigovernment uprising in Yemen, an unforgettable photograph of a woman cradling a wounded relative inside a mosque turned hospital, by Samuel Aranda, is the counterpoint to Chris Hondros’s rebel fighter — the pain of conflict, in Yemen as in Libya, still searing a decade later.

The war in Syria began in 2011 as an isolated revolt against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. There, too, civil war became a breeding ground for other discontents. Turkey’s aerial bombing of Tilsehir Hill in Syria, captured in a 2014 photo by Bulent Kilic, is a reminder of the many forces, ethnic, religious and geopolitical, drawn into Syria’s turmoil.

And then there were those who were pushed out. They risked their lives to cross the Mediterranean, some through now-porous Libya on the northern coast of Africa, others fleeing the uninhabitable cities across Syria for the apparent safety of Europe. Sergey Ponomarev’s photograph in late 2015 of migrants arriving on the island of Lesbos, in Greece, looks biblical, a desperate crossing made on faith and rickety boats.

Those migrants served as more than a release valve for conflict in the developing world. They also set off discontent, fueling a series of populist insurgencies in Europe, most notably Brexit, but also the Marine Le Pen movement in France and the rightist AfD in Germany. All were inspired by — and helped spread hostility toward — immigration and the globalist, free trade, open-border ideals of the European elite.

The United States never agreed to accept more than a tiny share of those displaced by conflicts in Northern Africa and the Middle East. But immigration of people from predominantly Muslim countries and Latin America was one factor that helped power the rise of an especially unlikely populist, Donald J. Trump. The iconic images of the second half of the decade as often capture the newly exposed rifts in American society as ongoing instability abroad.

At one end of the spectrum is a photograph of Ieshia Evans, who made a defiant stand against police officers at a protest in Baton Rouge, La., to call for action against excessive force by the police against black men and women. At the other, in Georgia, in the spring of 2018, is the lighting of a swastika after a rally of the National Socialist Movement, amid a rise in white supremacist violence.

The enduring photos by Damon Winter, Doug Mills and Erin Schaff capture both the Trump campaign and the Trump presidency: an ardent young follower at a rally; a crisply cuffed president in the cabinet room; a meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea at the DMZ; and Nancy Pelosi’s “clap back” at the State of the Union address. Each recalls a distinct moment in presidential history: an American leader who stokes division and celebrates defiance of past presidential norms.

The decade closes with the House of Representatives voting to impeach Mr. Trump, ensuring that instability will continue to define politics at the opening of a new decade as it did the one we leave behind.

2010 2010 An environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, and a volcano causes chaos in Europe. Gulf of Mexico, April 20 In an image provided to The New York Times, emergency crews battled towering flames at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, which exploded on April 20 and sank days later, leaving 11 men dead and spilling about 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf. 2010 was rocked by natural disasters, with a destructive quake in Haiti and devastating floods in Pakistan. Elsewhere, the U.S. doubled down on its mission in Afghanistan. Kunar Province, Afghanistan, March 11 Afghan soldiers evacuated a wounded police officer to a United States Army outpost after a security checkpoint was ambushed by Taliban militants. Moises Saman for The New York Times Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, April 18 The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull glacier volcano sent ash clouds soaring 18,000 to 33,000 feet into the sky, causing a sweeping shutdown of airspace over northern Europe that left thousands of flights canceled. Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson/Arctic-images.com; FocusOnNature Kabul, Afghanistan, July 15 Bibi Aisha, an 18-year-old Afghan woman whose nose and ears were cut off by her husband, a Taliban fighter, and his family after she fled their abuse. Jodi Bieber Sindh Province, Pakistan, Sept. 13 A Pakistani Army helicopter set off a scramble for rations while delivering aid in Goza in the Dadu District, as catastrophic flooding devoured villages and agricultural lands, affecting some 20 million people. Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images April 5 American soldiers in full gear on a C-17 military transport plane from Manas Air Force Base in Kyrgyzstan to Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan. Damon Winter/The New York Times Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Jan. 15 A downtown street three days after a devastating magnitude 7 earthquake struck the island. More than 200,000 people lost their lives and tens of thousands of buildings were destroyed. Damon Winter/The New York Times

2012 2012 Hurricane Sandy ravages the Northeast, and a massacre at a school in Newtown, Conn. New York City, Oct. 31 An aerial view of Manhattan reflected the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which plunged parts of the city south of 39th Street into darkness for days. The powerful wind gusts and storm surges flooded buildings, crippled transit systems and brought the city to a halt. Iwan Baan/Reportage by Getty Images 2012 saw civil war take hold in Syria, feats of athleticism at the London Olympics, and divided voters re-elect President Obama. Visit the Year in Pictures here → Aleppo, Syria, Oct. 18 Two Syrian rebel soldiers tensely guarded their position in the Karmel Jabl neighborhood as light streamed through bullet holes in the wall behind them. Javier Manzano/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Gaza City, Nov. 19 A resident surveyed the damage as the Israeli military conducted a wave of deadly airstrikes on the Palestinian enclave. Israel contended that Hamas had precipitated the conflict. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times Moscow, May 7 Vladimir V. Putin entered St. Andrew’s Hall in the Grand Kremlin Palace to reclaim the Russian presidency. His inauguration seemed to re-energize large antigovernment street protests. Alexei Druzhinin/Russian International News Agency, via Associated Press Aleppo, Syria, Aug. 21 Wounded civilians in a field hospital after an airstrike destroyed a bakery. Opponents of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, reported a widening campaign by the military to sow fear in areas where the rebels were strong. Édouard Elias/Getty Images New Delhi, March 26 A Tibetan man set himself aflame to protest the impending visit to India of China’s president. Dozens of Tibetans have immolated themselves to draw attention to what they see as repression by the Chinese government. Manish Swarup/Associated Press Newtown, Conn., Dec. 14 Fear etched on their faces, children at Sandy Hook Elementary were led to safety after a mass shooting that left 26 dead at the school, including 20 first graders. Shannon Hicks/Newtown Bee, via Associated Press