A worker spreads coffee cherries to dry in the sun on a coffee plantation in Brazil. The March 1981 issue told the story of the whole coffee economy, nicknaming the crop "the bonanza bean."
Students are crowned homecoming king and queen during a football game at Maricopa High School in Arizona. When this story was published in 1977, Maricopa was considered a small town outside of the suburban sprawl. Now, it's considered part of the Phoenix metropolitan area.
PHOTOGRAPH BY H. EDWARD KIM, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Buddhist pilgrims walk around the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, Nepal. The circles around the sacred site and the pilgrimage itself are known as a kora.
PHOTOGRAPH BY MAGGIE STEBER, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A guide carries a rifle while taking a traveler through the Stikine River Valley in British Columbia, Canada. He is Tahltan, a First Nations tribe that has long lived in the river valley.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH LEEN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A dramatic storm means rainfall will soon make its way into the Ogallala Aquifer in Nebraska. The aquifer supplies irrigation for crops and drinking water for millions of people from South Dakota to the Texas Panhandle.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM RICHARDSON, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Merchants at a market in Saqqara, Egypt, carry trays of dates on their heads. Saqqara is home to an ancient burial ground that dates all the way back to the Bronze Age.
PHOTOGRAPH BY KENNETH GARRETT, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A craftsman works on a wood-and-paper effigy of Ravana, a 10-headed demon king, for the 1962 Dussehra Festival in New Delhi, India. During the Hindu festival, torches will set the effigy ablaze, and fireworks will shoot out of its eyes.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAYAWANTI SHOURIE, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Every November, this icon of Our Lady of Porta Vaga is borne across Manila Bay in the Philippines. The ceremony is in remembrance of Spanish trade galleons that traveled between Mexico and the Philippines from 1565 to 1815.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SISSE BRIMBERG, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Dancers sway to the beat of soca—a fusion of soul and calypso music—at the Notting Hill Carnival in the late 1990s. The street festival, not to be confused with celebrations before Lent, has been held in London every August since 1966.
A rainy ceremony can't stop this Columbia University graduate from celebrating his new degree. This photo originally appeared in the September 1990 issue, in a story that traveled the length of Broadway in New York City.
Massive beams of selenite dwarf explorers in Mexico's Cave of Crystals, deep below the Chihuahuan Desert. Formed over millennia, these crystals are among the largest yet discovered on Earth.
PHOTOGRAPH BY CARSTEN PETER, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION