The Upcoming Events Service, like Updates and Publications, has two views: a main view that lists all the upcoming events in ascending order with the events that will occur the soonest on top, and a detailed view that shows the complete description for the event.
If you only want to have a more or two sentence description, the Events Service can be setup to not show a link to the detailed view.
Also, if you would like your web visitors to be able to see events that have passed, to be able to access events that have passed, the Events Service can be configured to include a link to an Archive page of all the past events.
The fields in the Web Editor for this Service include a Headline, Description, Start Date, and End Date field. If the event spans multiple days, enter both a start and an end date. Events with an end date entered will will continue to be listed on your site until this date has passed.