Conspiracy boards work great for this, actually. You sort events into pools based on historical weight, and arrange them within the pools based on date and rela

Conspiracy boards work great for this, actually. You sort events into pools based on historical weight, and arrange them within the pools based on date and relation to eachother. The big event or concurrent events go in the center pool with all the contributing events in satellite pools around it. The events are ordered within the pools where the closer to the top of the cluster they are the further back they happened, and whether they're on the right or left dictates if they influenced or were influenced by other events in the pool. If you want further sorting, you can use different colours of string to denote specific trends or historical timelines. It also makes it fun for students to sort through because you can actually see the literal threads connecting things and how small events flowed into bigger events and culminated in massive events.