This story appears in the November/December 2016 issue of National Geographic History magazine. Photograph by AKG/Album It’s inescapable: Every holiday season, merry music dominates the airwaves.

Flip through some of the most compelling National Geographic covers from the last 50 years. See every issue since 1888 cover-to-cover with Nat Geo PLUS, subscribing members’ all-access pass to ...

5 min read This story appears in the November/December 2016 issue of National Geographic History magazine. Icelandic sagas tell how the 10th-century Viking sailor Leif Eriksson stumbled on a new ...

This story appears in the March/April 2017 issue of National Geographic History magazine. Knowledge is power—and no knowledge was more assiduously coveted by European nations in the early 16th ...