The June 1985 issue of National Geographic magazine,
featuring Sharbat Gula, "The Afghan Girl"
January 13, 1888: The National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C. It is one of the largest nonprofit scientific and educational organizations in the world.
According to its website, it was founded "to increase and diffuse geographic knowledge." It sponsors and funds scientific research and exploration. National Geographic maintains a museum for the public in its Washington, D.C., headquarters.
National Geographic has retail stores in Washington, D.C., London, Sydney, and Panama. Its media arm is National Geographic Partners, a joint venture between The Walt Disney Company and the Society, which publishes a journal, National Geographic, in English and nearly 40 local-language editions. The magazine was famous for its maps, and also for publishing pictures of faraway peoples that Americans might never get to travel to see -- some of these pictures showing those people naked, giving children a "respectable" way of seeing that, decades before the founding of Playboy and its imitators.
From the founding of PBS in 1970, the network showed National Geographic Specials, until 2001, when the Society took matters into its own hands, and founded the National Geographic Channel, or NatGeo for short.
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January 13, 1888 was a Friday -- a Friday the 13th. Baseball and football were out of season. Hockey barely existed. And basketball didn't, and wouldn't for nearly 4 more years. So there were no scores on this historic day.
