In learning history there is a failure mode where everything just seems to be "one damn thing after another", with no coherent relationship. But while there is a lot of randomness and contingency in the unfolding of historical events, there are also long term trends that can help us to put local events in to a coherent framework that makes sense of them.
My own understanding of, and interest in, history has been significantly helped by started from a large scale and then moving inward. Humans evolved in Africa and from there spread through the Middle East into Europe and Asia. When our technology made it possible we extended our range into and across more hostile environments (further north for instance), at the same time changes in climate made some barriers to migration less hostile (ice ages lower sea levels and made access to Australia and the Americas more feasible, later melting ice made migration into the Americas from the north possible, etc.).
There is a lot more depth to go into here on different ways of life in hunter-gather societies and social organization, but a broad picture of the story of human migration and how and when people ended up colonizing the globe seems useful.
Around 10,000 BC agriculture was developed, first in the Fertile Crescent, and over then next few thousand years populations grew in size and complexity of organization. Eventually this lead to the first civilizations that you'll hear about and talk about in more detail. The same happened a few thousand years later in China, and then thousands of years later still in Africa and the Americas.
The growth of complexity and size in those early societies lead to a division of labour and a marketplace in which new ideas could be put to use, and technological progress accelerated. Larger states with greater state capacity were able to put some of this to use in things like large scale irrigation projects which expanded the area of cultivated land. This sort of expansion as agricultural technology developed broadening the areas where agriculture was economically feasible shows itself in the form of the expansion of "civilization" (state societies based on agriculture).
As wealth grew so did the returns to trade, but as the technology of trade developed (better ships, larger road networks) so too did the controllable size of states, and states and empires grew larger.
Etc.
This sort of higher level view of history is interesting but also allows us to put into context the more local level events that we might be learning about, as they were part of some particular phase of historical development. Learning about the events first without the context of the higher level view makes them seem much less relevant, and harder to put in relation to each other.
