What's a millenium, more or less, between friends?. . .some of the events, ideas, texts that fall, roughly, across semester break and which seem to me to be interesting from the perspective of "doing" Core--AKD. 

• 337 - Constantine's conversion, death
• 5^th century - northern barbarians trash Rome / western Roman Empire
• 622 - the Hegira, Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina
• 711 - Arabs into Spain
• 1150/67 - Universities at Paris / Oxford
• 1215 - Magna Carta. . .whatd'ya mean you got liberties?
• 1229 - Inquisition, Toulouse, forbade Bible reading by laymen
• 1274 - Thomas Aquinas died. . .the Greeks are back, courtesy of Arab scholars; how does one philosophize on the nature of being and knowledge in the Church of Augustine?
• 1295 - Marco Polo returns from China
• 1321 - Dante died. . .one hell of a poet, of course
• 14^th cent. - Black Death
• 1453 - Constantinople falls to the Turks
• 1454 - Gutenberg Bible printed
• 1486 - Malleus Maleficarum published. . .~83% of the thousands of people executed as witches between 1480 - 1700 were women.
• 1492-ish - Isabella & Ferdinand expel Jews, Moors. . .people come to expect the Spanish Inquisition.
• 1492/8 - European seafarers reach Americas, India
• 1513 - Machiavelli's Prince
• 1516 - Thomas More's Utopia
• 1517 - Luther nails his theses
• 1519 - Leonardo dies
• on mining: Henry Cornelius Agrippa (The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, 1530), "reiterated. . .moral strictures against mining found in the ancient treatises, quoting [a] passage from Ovid portraying miners digging into the bowels of the earth". . . making "the very ground more hurtful and pestiferous. . ."; Georg Agricola (On Metals, 1556) counters that "Nature has given the earth. . .to man that he might cultivate it and draw out of its caverns metals and other mineral products", an activity worthy of the "splendid and glorious natural endowment" of humanity (Merchant).
• 15^th/16^th centuries - "geared machines operated by horse, wind, or water power, such as grainmills, [etc.], become much more widespread" (Merchant).
• 1531 - Antwerp opens the first stock exchange
• 1558 - John Knox has bad timing: "It is a thing repugnant to the order of nature, that any woman be exalted to rule over men.  For God hath denied to her the office of a head. . ."
• 1600 - Giordano Bruno burns
• on clocks: Kepler (1605) "My aim is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but to a clockwork"; Boyle (d. 1691) "The world is like a rare clock. . .where all things proceed according to the artificer's first design, and the motions. . .do not [thereafter] require the peculiar interposing of the artificer, or any intelligent agent employed by him."
• 1616 - Shakespeare died. . .secular, sophisticated, when "the darkness was here [just] yesterday" (Conrad).
• 1619 - first African slaves are imported into Virginia
• 1637 - Venice opens the first public opera house
• 1642  - Galileo (look, the Sun has spots!) died; Newton was born
• 1684 - a delegation of "aristocratic Siamese arrived in Paris. . .the King of Siam, when asked by a missionary to turn Christian, [had] replied that divine Providence, had it wished a single religion to prevail in the world, could easily have so arranged it" (Palmer & Colton).  What to make of these civilized, philosophic strangers?
• 1662/6 - scientific societies formed in London / Paris
• 1687 - Newton's Principia; gravity goes as 1/r². . .but why?

References:
   Conrad, Heart of Darkness
   Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1983
   Palmer & Colton, A History of the Modern World, 1978