Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Rick Atkinson sits down with the Institute’s executive director, Andy Morse, to discuss the second book of his Revolution trilogy, Fate of the Day: The War For America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, that provides a riveting narrative covering the middle years of the Revolution. The first twenty-one months of the American Revolution—which began at Lexington and ended at Princeton—was the story of a ragged group of militiamen and soldiers fighting to forge a new nation. By the winter of 1777, the exhausted Continental Army could claim only that it had barely escaped annihilation by the world’s most formidable fighting force. Two years into the war, George III was determined to bring his rebellious colonies to heel, though his task was far too complicated. Not only was he fighting a determined enemy on the other side of the Atlantic in a conflict that was becoming ruinously expensive, but spies were telling him that the French and Spanish were threatening to join forces with the Americans. Drawing from his new book, Atkinson explores various figures within his book, his research process, and the significance of the American Revolution as we approach the 250th anniversary of American independence.
About the Speaker
Rick Atkinson is an award-winning journalist and author, who worked as reporter, foreign correspondent, and senior editor for more than twenty years at the Washington Post. His last assignments were covering the 101st Airborne during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and writing about roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. He is the author of seven narrative histories about five American wars, his most recent book is The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, which spent nearly three months on the New York Times bestseller list in 2019 and is the first volume in a planned trilogy on the American Revolution.
Previously, Mr. Atkinson wrote the Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of the liberation of Europe in World War II. The first volume, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943 (Henry Holt and Co., 2002), received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2003. The second volume, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 (Henry Holt and Co., 2007), drew praise from the New York Times as “a triumph of narrative history, elegantly written…and rooted in the sight and sounds of battle.” The final volume of the Liberation Trilogy, The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (Henry Holt and Co., 2013), ranked #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Mr. Atkinson’s awards include the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in history; the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, awarded to the Washington Post for investigative articles directed and edited by Atkinson on shootings by District of Columbia police officers. He is winner of the 1989 George Polk Award for national reporting, the 1989 John Hancock Award for excellence in business writing, the 2003 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Award, the 2007 Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense, the 2010 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing, the 2013 New York Military Affairs Symposium award for lifetime achievement, and the 2014 Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement from the Society for Military History. In December 2015 he received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, previously given to Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and David McCullough. In 2019 he was named a Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Fellow of the Georgia Historical Society.
Mr. Atkinson has served as the Gen. Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College, where he remains an adjunct faculty member. He is a Presidential Counselor at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, an elected member of the Society of American Historians and the American Antiquarian Society, and an inductee in the Academy of Achievement, for which he also serves as a board member. He formerly served on the governing commission of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.