The "Rivers": a continuous history for every country in the world. - Rivers of History: one line of cause and effect from prehistory to today. 103 rivers, from Japan, China and Europe to national histories, and every one of the 193 UN member states belongs to one. Each chapter asks a question, and the answer comes as you read. Choose "Key points / Standard / Detailed" to read at the level of a textbook's headings, bold terms or body text. - Rulers of the age, and the world at the same time: the king, emperor, president or prime minister in office at each section's year appears at the top (all reigns for Japan, China, England, Rome, Europe, the United States and Russia), and events from distant regions of the same years sit beneath every section. - Trunks and branches: regional trunks (Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa and more) reread through each country's eyes, with "read in the trunk" and "read in another river" to follow one event across rivers. - Indigenous history: 41 new events and 25 sections for Native Americans and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, from the Iroquois Confederacy, the Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee and Alcatraz to Lake Mungo, the Stolen Generations, the Tent Embassy and the Voice referendum. - Histories of Power volumes 8 and 9: "The American Presidents" and "The Russian Tsars", with 45 presidents and 24 tsars pinned at their accession years. - New story: "Lenin: what did he build?", one life followed in 27 chapters, from his brother's execution to the sealed train, October and the testament. - The China, Korea and North Korea rivers were checked against Japanese high-school textbooks (Yamakawa): the Triple Intervention, the Twenty-One Demands, Manchukuo and the Lytton Commission, the Nanjing Incident, the Kanto earthquake massacre of Koreans, the Korean missions to Edo, the Pyongyang Declaration and the abductions, the comfort-women agreement and the forced-labour rulings, and the Senkaku Islands are now stated as the textbooks state them. - Improvements: pin detail levels in settings; timeline zooms to a single year; tap a place name to move the map there; fixed rulers from other countries appearing in a river and the map opening on Japan for other countries; story illustrations are now shown whole, with 14 mismatched pictures replaced. Now 6,308 events, 92 stories and 103 rivers.

A big update to Story mode. - New series: Histories of Power, in 7 volumes: Japan's emperors, the emperors of China, the kings of England, the emperors of Rome, the popes, the kings of France and the German emperors. Each volume asks one question about why power endures, and an arrow traces where the seat of power moved, extending on the map as the chapters advance. - About 860 rulers pinned at their accession years: 126 emperors of Japan, China from Yu to today, 66 English monarchs, 179 Roman rulers, 34 popes, France from Hugh Capet to Macron, Germany from the Holy Roman Emperors to today's chancellor: all linked by "what followed", from Romulus to the present. - New stories: "Fifteen Years in the Quagmire: The Sino-Japanese War" and "Fire: the first power humans held", plus a new Religion shelf in the story list. - Share as image: build a picture with photo, locator map and QR code from any event or chapter, and post it to X, Facebook or LINE. Shared links now show it as their preview. - Improvements: the map quiz timer now starts when you press Start; event cards opened from stories show causes, aftermath and the favorite star; fixed place cards breaking when switching languages; "Save map as image" now saves to Photos on mobile. Now 3,870 events and 89 stories.

- Stories of World Heritage has grown by 18 volumes to 20 in all: Painful Heritage, Heritage in Danger, Sacred Mountains, Megaliths and Empires, Living Cities, Memory of the Earth, The First Twelve, Dawn of Civilisation, The Theatre of Palaces, Houses of Prayer, Taming Water, Abandoned Cities, Memory of the Machines, What the Roads Carried, Making Heritage of the 20th Century, Making the Wild a Heritage, Walls and Fortresses, and a journey down Japan through all 27 of its sites from Shiretoko to the Ryukyus. Each volume asks one question, and the map flies to a site with every chapter. There are now 277 World Heritage cards covering 234 sites, each with its inscription year, site number and a link to the official page - Added a new series, History through Books: Sapiens, The Dawn of Everything, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse, retraced chapter by chapter on the map and timeline. Every chapter carries the event cards the book draws on, plus a note on where current scholarship differs, and each volume closes with the book's answer and its critics - Rewrote Christianity: A Two-Thousand-Year Journey, Buddhism: The Road to Asia and Islam: The Story of Its Spread from the ground up, to the same standard as the other stories. The separate "tour" category is gone; everything reads as a story - Finishing a story now returns you to its place in the story list. The header now puts Stories first - Added a theme setting in the menu: follow the device, light or dark - On phones, the Previous and Next buttons for stories and article cards now sit at the top of the sheet where they are easier to reach. Fixed cards opened during a story that could not be scrolled or closed - Quiz journeys now count "questions" rather than "stops" - Fixed the Russian Empire label appearing over Britain (positioning for countries that cross the 180th meridian) - Fixed the event detail appearing to vanish when switching between Japanese and English with it open - The app now holds 3,034 events and 80 stories

- Added a new series, Stories of World Heritage: an opening volume on why humanity decided to preserve things at all, and a Japan volume asking how a country built of wood and paper kept anything at all. All 27 of Japan's World Heritage sites appear - Added a World Heritage category. Turn the other categories off for a map of heritage sites alone, and each entry now shows its inscription year, site number and a link to the official UNESCO page - Added volume 15 of The Story of Art, Rivers That Merge, following the quarter-century after the war, including the Gutai group, Mono-ha and Yayoi Kusama within the wider world - Greatly expanded the Map Quiz: identify a country from its flag, or find the place from the name of a capital or prefectural capital. Also added a hard mode where correct answers are not filled in, timing for each question and for the whole run, and a ranking of your five best times per stage - Fixed a bug where a stage you had completely cleared could never be played again. You can now start over as many times as you like - Read-aloud now works throughout the app, not only in stories: quiz questions, event articles and the full-screen reader can all be read to you - Added sounds for correct and incorrect answers, which can be turned off from the menu - Added a setting to show pins from every era at once, so the categories you choose appear on a single map regardless of the time range - Added the mountains, volcanoes, plains, basins, peninsulas and major rivers of Japan, each with its own description, filling in a map that used to go blank when you zoomed in - Raised the maximum zoom considerably, so closely spaced places such as those in Kyoto and Nara can be tapped individually - Tidied up overlapping place, mountain and river names on the map and revised how label sizes grow as you zoom. The text size setting in the menu now applies to map labels as well - Fixed climographs not opening when tapping a city in the climate view. They can also be opened from a city's description - Fixed the menu closing every time you changed a setting inside it - Added a Reset view item to the menu for when a browser is left zoomed in and cannot be returned to normal

- Added a link button to event details — copy a link to the event you're viewing, and whoever opens it starts with the details already showing - Added a link button to each story card to share a link that opens that story from the beginning - Added a Collection button in the header for one-tap access to your cards and favorites - Fixed event details sometimes not appearing right away when opening a shared link - Fixed switching languages sometimes pulling you back to a previous screen - Portraits and artwork now show author and license credits where attribution is required - Fixed a few events showing an incorrect image

- Added a search button on the map for quick event lookup - Stories: detail cards opened from links or pins can now be closed and resized - Stories: you can now open event details from map pins, the timeline, and search results during a story - Stories: other events of the era now appear as subtle pins for context - Fixed narration sometimes stopping at the end of a chapter - Added a 2.0x narration speed and improved speed control support - Updated terms to match current textbooks - Tidied up the map buttons