As the saying goes: a picture often tells more than a thousand words.
This is certainly true for graphical timelines.
A detailed listing of events and dates in tabular form may offer the reader a lot of specifics, but may fail to provide an overview, a grand perspective.
You will find here a detailed recipee for generating graphical timelines from a simple script.
You will need three small programs, which are all open source and can be downloaded from this site.
EasyTimeline is also an integral part of the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia.
(all links in the diagrams below also lead to the English Wikipedia).
First a few simple examples of what is possible.
For a much more extensive (admittedly very crowded) example see World War II - Asian Theatre.
Soviet Leaders
Just to show you that the script syntax is reasonably intuitive: here is the script for the image to the left.