History isn’t a list of dates. It’s regular people making choices without knowing how things would end.

Dates are the labels rather than the content. What happened was people deciding things with incomplete information, under pressure, with no idea which way it would go, and the outcome that now looks inevitable was one of several live possibilities at the time. Read as a settled sequence, everyone in it looks either obvious or stupid. Read as choices made in the dark, it becomes recognisable.

Take one event you were taught and find out what the people in it believed was about to happen. Ask what they did not know. It stops being a list and becomes a situation.