After experimenting with this for years I have found a method that I find works extremely well.
I use a memory palace as a timeline in combination with 3-digit numbers for each year.
Generally I have one street (in the area where I grew up and know very well) for each century. So e.g. the 18th century is my own home street (while the 17th century is the street below that one and the 19th century the street above). If I want to remember that Bach died in 1750 I know that I should place that image approximately half-way up on the street, which is at the curve in the garden of one of my neighbours. I visualize Bach dying in the garden and also add my image for 1750 (to pinpoint the year and also get a clearer and more interesting image), which is an ice cream bowl. So Bach is dying in an ice cream bowl in the garden.
Some nice things about this method:
-
I don’t need to decide from the start exactly where on the street each year shall be. I can just place the new info approximately at the right place on the “timeline” relative to the length of the street and previously placed years/events.
-
Using location in combination with number images creates much more stable images than just using number images in a “void”. It happens that I forget the exact number image but almost never the location on the street, which makes it easy to go through the possible number images and quickly find the correct one.
-
As tarnation wrote, what you really want is a holistic understanding of history and to get a feeling for when in time something happened. This provides you with that in the perhaps clearest way possible, since you can immediately relate it to all other things on the timeline. One of the not so many ways where you can actually argue that using a memory palace helps understanding even more than just learning the “regular” way (if we disregard how much easier it is to memorize with memory techniques of course).
I have used this method for the last three years and memorized thousands of historical and recent events with it. It is still working really well and I have started placing even things where the year is not that important in this palace since it’s usually the easiest way of remembering it anyway. I would say that this is the best “real” use of memory techniques I have ever had.