You can get a graphical view of the project history with tools like gitk
. Just run:
gitk --all
If you want to checkout a specific branch:
git checkout <branch name>
For a specific commit, use the SHA1 hash instead of the branch name. (See Treeishes in the Git Community Book, which is a good read, to see other options for navigating your tree.)
git log
has a whole set of options to display detailed or summary history too.
I don't know of an easy way to move forward in a commit history. Projects with a linear history are probably not all that common. The idea of a "revision" like you'd have with SVN or CVS doesn't map all that well in Git.