This paper will discuss the ways in which the significance of the date 480/79 was elevated in the course of historiographical developments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Most particularly, it will emphasize the ways in which readings of Herodotus' Histories changed over this period, as Christian readings of the first books gave way to a new, but never fully convincing Whiggish emphasis on the 'clash of civilizations.' I hope to show not only that that The Histories do not need to be read in this way, but that centuries of readers have provided us with many alternative visions of the lessons we might learn from 'the father of history.' 

Suzanne Marchand is LSU Systems Boyd (University) Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.  Marchand obtained her BA from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago .  She served as assistant and then associate professor at Princeton University before moving to LSU in 1999.  She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1870 , German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship, and in 2020, Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe.  She is spending this semester at Princeton as an Old Dominion Fellow at the Humanities Center, during which time she is teaching a course with Anthony Grafton.

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