I recommend books. :P Specifically, I recommend starting with biographies. If it is a time and place where your knowledge is pretty thin, the good biography is partly focused on telling a story. In part, you are not being pelted with 100 names and places. It's the same few or several names that are followed for some decades. In my experience, this time spent 'in the weeds' up close to specific characters will give you more scope of what really happened and why.

For example, I knew not one thing about Haitian history until I laid my hands on Phillipe Gerard's Toussaint Louverture: A Revolutionary Life recently. Following one noteworthy family through 5 decades communicates to the reader what really happened in an effective way. This experience told me what happened and also illustrated how people who are a product of their culture in that time and place would think and perceive things.

Bonus thing - CSPAN has lots of authors on book tours in various shows having a sitdown for an hour talking about their books. You can test drive what you want to learn about here. Search for a subject, then listen to some authors until you hear one who sounds the most interesting.