Draw simple timeline with D3
I recently had to do something similar. I ended up writing a d3 plugin that could handle this case among a few others. https://github.com/jiahuang/d3-timeline
I'm pretty new to D3 as well, but I hope it's useful.
You should be able to accomplish this with a time scale and an axis
Scott Murray has a really good set of tutorials that culminates in one for axes
Just think of your time line as a 1-dimensional scatterplot with a time scale.