For as long as I can remember, I have always placed dates on an imaginary timeline, that “placing” involving stuff like fuzzy mental imagery of events attached to the date-labelled point on the timeline. It’s probably much less crisp than yours because so far I haven’t tried to learn history that intensely systematically via spaced repetition (though your example makes me want to do that), but otherwise sounds quite familiar.
I have something like this for years: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j8WMRgKSCxqxxKMnj/what-i-think-about-when-i-think-about-history
For as long as I can remember, I have always placed dates on an imaginary timeline, that “placing” involving stuff like fuzzy mental imagery of events attached to the date-labelled point on the timeline. It’s probably much less crisp than yours because so far I haven’t tried to learn history that intensely systematically via spaced repetition (though your example makes me want to do that), but otherwise sounds quite familiar.