Some different ways to try to wrap your head around history. Famous people by birth decade, going back to 580 BC: (thread)

Visual lifespans:

Visuals can help us get a better sense of what was going on in different moments.

Mozart wrote his Requiem the same year the US forefathers were writing the Bill of Rights, and Beethoven had a love-hate relationship with Napoleon.

These four were all in their primes around the year 1610.

Copernicus’s seminal work was happening right when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Henry VIII was marrying Catherine of Aragon.

While Copernicus, Michelangelo, and Henry VIII were happening, it was also the height of European exploration (purple), the early days of the Protestant Reformation (blue), the Italian Renaissance was in full swing (pink), and Guru Nanak was founding Sikhism. Busy times.

The US Civil War coincided with a legendary literary decade.
Darwin: On the Origin of Species (1859)
Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1861)
Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment (1866)
Tolstoy: War and Peace (1869)

Full post: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html

The first image is fuzzy in mobile, sorry. Comes through better in the post: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/01/horizontal-history.html