Recently I was reading about English history in the 16th century on Wikipedia and found myself having to constantly check if a certain event happened before, during, or after a different event, and how this all would have added up to an actual world as experienced by people living at the time. The way that history tends to be encapsulated into specific "events" and placed in a linear timeline makes understanding this context basically impossible – unless you just read a bunch of books about the topic and then create your own interpretation of what was actually happening.

It made me wish for a different way of presenting history. The best alternative I could come up with was something like a map of various rivers that intersect and cross each other at certain events. Each river being a particular trend or pattern, like "military buildup, conflict, then decommissioning," "personal incomes rose," or "belief in X rose/fell." Smaller tributaries could be included to cover smaller trends that sometimes grow larger.

This would avoid the annoying habit where things are explained chronologically but then have to jump back in time later in the narrative, when the subject changes. And it would also illustrate better the idea that history isn't so much "one damn thing after another" but more like an ongoing interaction of different trends.

Side note: writing this comment made me think of the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, which I don't know much about but seems like a good metaphor for this topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratītyasamutpāda