Were there alternatives? A way of greeting that would be totally creepy nowadays?

How has it come to be known today as the year 2015? As christ's birth being year 1. What culture has been recording all these days so meticulously that we confirm the date today to reflect the actual time between present day and year 0? For example the Chinese new year is different than other countries. what other cultures calendar got scrapped to make way for the general consensus of the year we use in our present day to day.

My wife's family is ethnically Chinese. For some reason, they moved to Cambodia at least a generation before the Khmer Rouge genocide. Why might Chinese have emigrated to Cambodia?

My Mother-in-law won't talk about Pol Pot and what happened. All I know is most of her family was killed before the churches brought her to the States. They don't event have birth certificates. I would like our kids to know a little bit about their ancestry but I was taught nothing about these events in school. Where is a good place to learn about it? Any great books on the topic?

I see a lot of people migrated from Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, France etc... in the early days of the creation of the USA, but languages from those countries are rarely or even never used in the public today.

How did English become the only official language?

With the ongoing debate in the American South about monuments to Confederates and the Confederacy, I have begun to wonder how Germany handled any Nazi monuments that may have survived the war. Obviously I assume they didn't build any after the end of the war like many of the Confederate monuments, but I would still like to know what became of any public Nazi symbols.

I'm writing a story, and I'd like to know more about how a medieval army was organized from the perspective of a common soldier. Did they have anything comparable to sergeants? If so, how were they chosen, particularly when armies were being raised out of the peasantry? Or would a knight give orders to large formations of peasant soldiers?

I'm just curious as to the climate before Stalin started to purge the ranks, was there any actual antagonism at work, or secret ploys to act against him? Or was it all conjecture and based on the workings of a totalitarian paranoid dictator.

Follow up questions of less imporatance:

• Did said terrible purges have any positive knock-on effect in ensuring Soviet Russia's solidarity against Nazi Germany when they were being battered? By that I mean no one was going to question Stalin or fight internally due to the terrors of the previous decade, so perhaps this caused the Soviet chain of command to act decisively?

Also third question (sorry but they're all related)

• By decimating the officer ranks of the Red Army could it be argued that the Soviets actually adapted to the new tactics of the Second World War better than for example the French did? As there were a lot of more junior ranks in high positions, people who had experienced blitzkreig first hand in Spain and from Barbarossa, so could help form the basis of soviet offensive strategy based on that etc.

I'm not seeking to apologise for any of the terrors Stalin committed on his own people, but there may have been some positive effects of clearing out the old guard, and creating a climate of fear in a war of annihilation scenario.

Eager to hear a historians outlook on the purges

Did every culture have a different date system? Did ordinary people bother to know the year they were born? How did traders from different cultures express the year and was there some commonlynused universal start date for these purposes even if culturally they recognized another start date (like how the Chinese have a calandar and the Jews have a calandar, both counting from different start dates)?

Was playing Barbarian Invasion for Rome 1 Total War when it dawned on me, yes the Western Roman Empire was falling to pieces and could easily be seized. Yet, at that very same time the Han Dynasty of China was falling also. Why didn't the Huns just stay there in China and take it over instead of migrating to Europe and sacking Rome?

Also, if someone wouldn't mind explaining to me any difference between the Huns and the Mongols.

From what I remember, Egypt was incredibly valuable to ancient empires due to the incredible amount of food produced there, so much that Rome imported food to feed the urban poor. Now Egypt imports millions of dollars worth of US wheat and still has trouble feeding its population. Why did production not grow to match the population?

Is there any evidence that this myth may be based on some sort of historical conflict, perhaps between proto-Athenians and Minoans?

(It was 114 BC)

So in the last part of Chapter 3, Part II Du Beauvoir seems to describe some sort of Feminist revolution in Rome. She seems to make the following essential claims:

• In Rome women were legally unequal, because they were considered legally the guardians of the men in their family or of their husbands.

• However, all citizens of Rome were afforded some dignity and economic purpose and women were considered an important asset of the Roman Empire.

• The contradiction between general social and cultural respect vs. relatively little legal power caused women to march in the street in protest: "They sort out the statue of the Mother of Gods and bore it along the Tiber."

• This was all brought to a halt in 114 with the Scandal of the Vestal Virgins.

The actual passage is a half dozen pages long or so and she lists a variety of laws and a variety of dates and it's quite hard for me to work out the exact story without much of a frame of reference about the Roman Empire to base this on. So how much of what's listed above is true and what is the ELI5 explanation of this whole Roman 0th wave feminist movement?

I heard this specifically when reading about Corte's native counselor La Malinche, who although did speak the Aztec's language of Nahuatl, had little to no knowledge of the customs and elegant manners of Aztec diplomatic discussion.

So what would this "flowery" sort of talking be like?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, why was Normandy so much greater for Stalin and FDR than Italy? Why didn't the allies just focus their troops on the Italian front instead of stifling them?

Thanks for all of the great responses, yo!

I've heard Plato recalled his past 5 lives, and John the Baptist was supposedly reincarnation of Elijah.

Ps: I thought of this question because the theme is around this subject this week :)