A thousand years ago, the world was a radically different place. Europe was fragmented and struggling while China and the Islamic world stood at the height of their power and innovation. Great empires rose and fell, religions spread across continents, and trade routes quietly began stitching distant civilizations together. It was a world without a single center, yet full of momentum in every direction.

Learn more about the world in the year 1000 on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time

to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed.

It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now.

Time travel with us. Every week the through line podcast from NPR. In episode 1500, I began a series which looked at the state of the

world every 100 years, then every 50 and eventually

every 25. The need to increase the rate at which I did episodes was necessary because, as we got

closer to the present, the rate of change the world underwent accelerated. Once I reached 2025,

I had arrived in the present, and many people were wondering what I'd do next. I had some

people suggest I make predictions about the future, but honestly, that would just be making

stuff up and there would be no value in it, since I'm sure almost all of my predictions

...