I like this post called “Horizontal History” on Wait But Why. The author takes a number of famous people from all over the world and plots their life spans side by side. It sounds simple, but it makes a point about things that were going on in parallel at various times that we tend to think of in isolation because that is how we studied them. I always thought it would be an interesting way to teach history to take a particular year or decade and look at who was alive and what was going on not just in one country or part of the world, but everywhere. You could take it one step further by picking places and times at random, and asking who was around and what they were doing, not just famous people but ordinary people. What were their lives like? What sources of information did that have about what was going on nearby and far away, and what did they think of these events? What did they eat and where did their food come from, what technologies did they use in their daily lives and what technologies were they aware of, what diseases did they have, what holidays did they celebrate, what work or other economic transactions did they engage in, what natural ecosystems did they interact with, what was their climate and weather like? You could ask the latter two questions even in the absence of humans. Start piecing this together for enough places and times, and we might start to have a more holistic understanding of history. We might understand how the past was different from the present, and that might in turn help inform our imagination about how the future will be different from the present.