Iceland has digitised the historical collections for all of the nation’s newspapers, newsletters and small magazines and popped a unified search box on them. My search for a random set of likely keywords suggests they’re all in the local language.
Iceland’s historical digitised books collection is similarly comprehensive, and also contains a small number of English-language books recounting visits and stays on the Iceland.
There’s also a similar historic manuscripts online library, and a historical maps collection with an embedded timeline of click-able thumbnails.
The timeline is built on the open source Web-widget SIMILE Timeline from MIT. I note that there’s now a 2015 WordPress Plugin which integrates the SIMILE Timeline into a self-hosted WordPress installation, and this rather usefully appears to allow the user to avoid a lot of hacking-and-slashing through the javascript and HTML. SIMILE can use multiple side-scrolling bands, allowing you to display and navigate long or highly detailed timelines.
A simpler slideshow-like alternative would be TimelineJS, fairly easily workable via a Google Spreadsheet template rather than WordPress. The free service imports the completed Google Spreadsheet and automatically outputs an elegant simple side-scrolling timeline. Note however that the developers say that… “We recommend not having more than 20 slides [timeline points] for a reader to click through”, and that the Web page embedding code for “TimelineJS does not work with WordPress.com sites”.
For small tablet-tastical timelines + templates, see the $12 Responsive Timeline by Toghrool on CodeCanyon, and his Responsive Timeline WordPress version. Made in 2017, and it looks good for making a short timeline which will have to be seen by tablet-centric clients from beyond the world of education.
Omeka also has the Neatline plugin, which might be worth a look if you’re working with maps and images and time.
If you can pay a monthly fee, I see there’s also now a nice-looking commercial timeline service called Tiki Toki.