"Herodotus, the worldwide ethnographer and historian of the Persian Wars, provides a striking demonstration of how the account of past events of national history and the description of foreign peoples participate in the rhetoric of shaping attitudes about the present. Telling Wonders: Ethnographic and Political Discourse in the Work of Herodotus studies the narrative of the Histories in order to uncover the political message communicated to a Greek audience of the fifth century B.C."--BOOK JACKET.