We tend to learn about history by following a particular life or a conflict through the years – what Tim Urban, who runs the blog Wait But Why, calls “understanding history in a vertical sense.” But in a new blog, Urban offers another fascinating approach to understanding history: Taking a big “horizontal” slice to look at who was alive around the world in a certain year.

Here's Urban's illustration of horizontal history around the year 1500. The bars below represent the life spans of various historical figures.

You can see right away some of the big themes of the world at the time. There’s Machiavelli and Michelangelo in the Italian Renaissance. Magellan, Ponce de Leon, Columbus and Pizarro are carrying out the golden age of European exploration. And Martin Luther, William Tyndale and John Calvin are sowing the seeds of the Protestant Reformation.

Urban acknowledges that the names in his graphics are American and Euro-centric, since his research looked at materials made for an English-speaking audience. And of course, the list leaves a lot of people out -- history is pretty big, after all. But there are a few non-European and non-American names in these graphics -- over on the right above, for example, is Guru Nanak, the founding prophet of Sikhism.