When I was a girl, my mom bought me a book called The World of Captain John Smith, by Genevieve Foster. It gave basic information about all the major notables and events of the same era from around the globe. She did a series of similar books. No segmentation there. From a review of one:

Foster earned her reputation by her masterful display of "horizontal history"—telling the story of world events in the geo-political sphere, while giving as much importance to advances in science, medicine, music, literature, and exploration.

When I was in school, the segmentation of history was certainly a problem, though I didn't realize it at the time.  You ended up with a disjointed view of history.  That is, you didn't always get an understanding that certain events were occurring simultaneously.

For example, you got the impression that woolly mammoths died out long before man formed civilizations.  It was cave men, grunting and groaning, wearing loin clothes hunting woolly mammoths with pointed sticks, right?  And woolly mammoths were long gone before we started using language and building homes outside of caves.  But, woolly mammoths were still around when the pyramids in Egypt were being built.

Others: Galileo and Isaac Newton seemed like they were ages apart, but they were both born in the same year.  The first vaccine was tested in Napoleon's time.  When beer was invented, the Sahara wasn't a desert yet.  When the crossbow was first used in Europe, the Chinese were already using guns.

William Shakespeare was still alive when the British were starting colonies in America.  Leonardo da Vinci and Christopher Columbus were contemporaries.  Also, the last vestige of the Roman Empire fell less than fifty years before Columbus reached America.  Mozart was composing music when Americans were declaring independence.  The Wild West in America took place during the latter part of the Victorian era in England.

You probably never realized that in school.