Woodrow Wilson was the first American President to leave the Western Hemisphere during his period of office, and, as befitted him, the circumstances in which he did so were neither casual nor frivolous. He went to Europe in late 1918 to take part in the peace conference following a war that the United States had played a crucial part in bringing to a decisive end. His aim was to secure a peace that accorded with the proposals he had set out in his Fourteen Points address of January 1918 and in other speeches — a peace that would be based upon justice and thus secure consent, that would embody liberal principles(the self-determination of peoples as far as practicable, the prohibition of discriminatory trade barriers), and that would be maintained by a new international organization in which the United States, breaking its tradition of isolation, would take part — a league of nations that would provide a general guarantee of “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The symbolism of this dramatic moment, with the American prophet coming to bring redemption to the Old World, imprinted on the minds of contemporaries an image of Wilson which has affected most subsequent historiography. Viewing events from Vienna, that special victim of the First World War, Sigmund Freud found “the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, from the first unsympathetic, and… this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny.”

Rome after the Second World War presented something of an anomaly. Of all the traditional capitals of European civilization it was the least affected by the conflict. Because of the Pope's presence, it had not been bombed, and it had escaped the heavy fighting in the campaigns to the south. Indeed, so easily was it taken that one film was to show the Eternal City captured by a single jeep. Italy was also faster to recover than any of the other combatants. American money flooded into the country, and political life was quickly under way again. All this made it a good place for visitors, a relative bright spot amidst a shattered landscape. Harold Acton, the English historian who went there in 1948, remarked that “After the First World War American writers and artists had migrated to Paris: now they pitched upon Rome.” Among those who visited Rome or lived there for a period after the war were Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Frederic Prokosch, Daniel Cory, Alfred Kazin, Samuel Barber, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick (slightly later), as well as Acton himself and a host of less well-known figures. Many were entertained by Lawrence and Babel Roberts, under whose influence “the Roman Academy became an international rendezvous for artists and intellectuals.” While they were there, a large proportion of these writers made a pilgrimage to the Convent of the Blue Sisters, where since 1941 George Santayana had been living in a single room.

In recent years historians have emphasized the centrality of women to religious life, especially among the older Protestant denominations in the northeastern section of the United States. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women and girls were usually the majority of attenders at prayer meetings and Sunday services, made up the bulk of converts at revivals and provided the greatest number of candidates for church membership. They were also great fund raisers not only for their own congregations, but for a network of inter-denominational missionary agencies which sprang up during the first two decades of the nineteenth century and helped to impress a more evangelical character upon American society. As Nancy Cott has argued, ministers may have seen this work as part of woman's appropriate and subordinate “sphere,” but for the women themselves “evangelical religion nourished the formation of a female community that served…as both a resource and a resort outside the family.”