Two young women dressed as lobsters participate in the annual Lobster Festival in Rockland, Maine. The event was popular when this picture appeared in the September 1952 issue, and it's remained so. Some 30,000 people attend the festival every year.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LUIS MARDEN, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair welcomed more than 50 million visitors to its exhibitions. In this picture, a young girl drives a toy car across an enormous map of New York State.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES P. BLAIR, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
The sun sets behind onlookers at the Big Rodeo in Burwell, Nebraska. This story from the November 1998 issue tracked the state's economic rebirth, and was photographed by Nebraska native Joel Sartore.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEL SARTORE, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
At a hospital in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, a nurse holds up a tightly swaddled newborn. When the photo this story was in published in the 1980s, families earned government subsidies for every child they had.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DEAN CONGER, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A brass band leads a funeral procession on New Orleans, Louisiana, in this photo from the February 1971 issue. Funerals in the city often involve one of these unique parades from the service to the burial site.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES L. STANFIELD, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A story in the November 1959 traveled California's coast on the famous Highway 1. One stop was a famous nursery specializing in begonias, which some travelers stopped to admire.
PHOTOGRAPH BY B. ANTHONY STEWART, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
In Bilcice, Czech Republic, a newly married couple walks to the bride's home after their wedding in a country church. The picture originally appeared in a September 1993 story documenting the "velvet divorce" of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JAMES L. STANFIELD, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
A story in the August 1965 issue followed the lives of an Amish community in Mascot, Pennsylvania. Here, some 150 people work together to build a barn in just one day for a neighbor who lost his in a fire.
PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
Male students at Georgetown University in the early 1950's use headphones and tape recorders to study foreign languages. The university would eventually become a co-ed school in 1969.
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN E. FLETCHER AND ANTHONY B. STEWART, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION
In California, a laborer loads freshly cut flowers into a truck for shipment. This image published in an April 2001 story that tracked the international flower trade, from farm to market.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SISSE BRIMBERG, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION