Bridging a twenty-year gap in their practice, Elizabeth Carr and Christine Counsell bring out the similarities in their use of timelines in their planning, teaching and assessment. What they also have in common is the fact that their experimentation with timelines as a way of strengthening cumulative knowledge emerged in remarkably similar policy contexts. In 1994, history teachers in England were being encouraged to develop their own assessment systems, ones that built both knowledge and secondorder thinking, just as they are now.