The aim of this chapter is to analyse the role played by ethnography in perceptions of the opposition between Herodotus and Thucydides and of the development of Greek historiography. From a vast range of possible evidence, I have selected a number of writers, some influential in their own right, some simply representative of their age. I will focus in turn on the place of ethnography in narratives of the development of historiography, in views of Herodotus’s own work and in comparisons between Herodotus and Thucydides. This reception history will show how views of the ancient development of the genre of historiography were influenced by new conceptions of history in the modern world, in particular by the new forms of historicism that develop over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Besides its inherent intellectual interest, the story unfolded here is important for its continued influence on modern scholarship. In the context of this volume, it provides a firm basis for understanding the instances of Herodotean reception which are explored in subsequent chapters. From the chapter as a whole it will emerge not only that histories of historiography, as much as any other form of historical writing, are moulded by the concerns of the historian’s present but also, and perhaps more unexpectedly, that ethnography, a practice often criticized as a vehicle of demarcation and exclusion, has itself become a target of exclusionary rhetoric in modern accounts of historiography.