Why are we surprised to find ancient Persia at the heart of the American Revolution? Two centuries have buried the giant footprint of the world’s first empire in the thoughts and actions of eighteenth-century Americans as they sought to proclaim their distinctiveness against the backdrop of European monarchies. This lecture will excavate the enormous appeal of the ancient Persians (today called the Achaemenids) in this early revolutionary moment, the sources for Americans' knowledge of this not-so-lost civilization in trans-Atlantic exchanges of knowledge and artifacts, and the uses to which Americans put ancient Persia as they launched their own continental empire after the revolution.

Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, where she is also Professor by courtesy of Classics. She is the author of 5 books, most recently How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America, published by Princeton University Press in 2024. She has published extensively, in books and articles, on why the American revolutionaries found the ancient Mediterranean so captivating, and she is also active in the history of science, with a forthcoming book titled Planet of the Apes: How Apes Became Global after Darwin.

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