ABSTRACT
A convention of twentieth-century cultural history is that the United States became a full player on the international stage through its intervention in World War II. The young James Ackerman, a future PhD student of Krautheimer and subsequently a professor at Berkeley and Harvard, encountered northern Italy at the end of the war, and, as he described it, liberated Mantua. The general was forced into retirement in the late 1620s, only to be recalled in desperation following the Swedish entry into the war and the victories of King Gustavus Adolphus. At the end of the seventeenth century, Prince Eugene of Savoy likewise rose to great status through military and organizational brilliance in service to the Habsburgs, first in the ongoing wars against the Ottoman Turks, and then in the War of the Spanish Succession.
