I have a hard time visualizing historical events in relation to other historical events before, after and around the same time.

So imagine a digital globe built with GlobeKit with a timeline scrubber.

• As you scrub through time, historical event labels show up on the globe. You can see what was going on around the world around the same time.
• Events could be filtered by categories such as inventions, science, art, religion, wars, governments etc.
• If you zoomed in on an area, you would allow for more detail similar to how you discover more road names when you zoom in on an area in Google Maps. Events of lesser importance would begin to show up with more specific geographical markers.
• Countries would dynamically be relabeled and boundary lines redrawn as time progresses.