I have been struggling with the same problem while trying to learn about human history because I wanted to first get a good 10000 foot view. It's really hard grasping what happened when, especially when things get really complicated after the fall of the Roman Empire.

It's also interesting that there is no (or I couldn't find) readily available (free or paid) web app which would allow us to sort of slide over a timeline of history and show events which happened at that date/week/month/year. Even better if that could be filtered by event and importance.

The best I could find are various timelines od history which try the parallel rivers approach, but they are mostly huge and unwieldy.