The Greatest Graphic Ever?

According to a whole lot of people, it's this, drawn by Charles Joseph Minard to depict the size of Napoleon's army as it advanced on and retreated from Moscow. There's some commentary and another, slightly smaller image here, as well as some more excellent graphics.

I was looking at this because for my thesis I've gathered a whole bunch of data on civil rights protest in Britain, most of it qualitative but with over 100 discrete events in a spreadsheet, and I want to design something to visually represent the changing nature of black protest (as an extension of political participation) in Britain from 1960-1965, my timeframe.

What I have in terms of data for each event, culled from newspapers and organizations, are the date, the type of protest (strike, boycott, sit-in, etc.), the location, a rough estimate of the number of participants, the organizations involved, and the goal/target of the event, as well as some other odds and ends. General trends I can observe are an overall increase in protest events, an increase in participation in those events, a change in the events from 'low cost' protests such as marches to 'high cost' protests like boycotts and strikes, and a move from 'solidarity protests' held in London to address concerns about empire and allies (namely the US) to protest directed more specifically at Britain and local authorities.

If anyone has a great idea of how to represent that with an image, or two or three, lay it on me.