30 phenomenal vintage pictures from the Nat Geo archives

No matter your society or culture, some aspects of life ring true for all of us.

Take education, for instance. Whether it’s in Ami Vitale’s image of two female students on a rickshaw in Kolkata, India, or in James L. Stanfield’s image of three Bedouin women in an adult literacy class, we recognize the feeling of heading back to school.

Or what about the way sports bring us together? In Justin Locke’s 1950s photo of cyclists awaiting the start of the Tour de France, crowds stopped to watch the famous race.

And as a turbulent election approaches in the United States, some images remind us that politics have weathered change before—such as David Arnold’s picture of two students registering to vote after the 26th Amendment lowered the U.S. national voting age from 21 to 18.

Explore these vintage images to find more common threads in our shared experiences.