America @ 250: Celebrating Freedom’s Giant Leap
A Conversation With Rick Atkinson
Date: Wednesday, Sept. 16
Time: 6 p.m.
Location: Stewart Center’s Fowler Hall
This event is free and open to the public with a general admission ticket.
Historian Rick Atkinson is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author known for his gripping narratives of military conflict from the American Revolution and World War II to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Throughout his writing, Atkinson has built a body of work that combines meticulous research with elegant prose.
Atkinson is the author of the New York Times bestseller “The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777,” the first volume of his acclaimed Revolution Trilogy.
The second volume in the planned trilogy, “The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780,” was the New York Times No. 1 nonfiction bestseller when published in 2025. The book continued Atkinson’s sweeping narrative of the Revolution, capturing the conflict’s critical middle years with vivid storytelling and deep historical insight.
Atkinson served as a historical advisor and an on-camera commentator for Ken Burns’ PBS documentary series “The American Revolution,” which commemorates the nation’s 250th anniversary.
He also is the author of the Liberation Trilogy, a definitive history of the liberation of Europe in World War II. The first volume, “An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943,” won the Pulitzer Prize for history. It was followed by “The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944,” and “The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945,” which became a New York Times No. 1 bestseller and was hailed as “history written at the level of literature.”
His other books include “The Long Gray Line,” a narrative account of the West Point Class of 1966; “Crusade,” about the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91; and “In the Company of Soldiers,” which chronicles his time embedded with Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In addition to winning Pulitzer Prizes for history, national reporting and public service, Atkinson has received the George Polk Award, the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize. He has served as the Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at the U.S. Army War College and remains on its adjunct faculty.
A former reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at the Washington Post, Atkinson has reported from extended stints in Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq and many other countries, where he earned a reputation as one of America’s most incisive chroniclers of war and leadership.
Born in Munich, Germany, and raised on military posts as the son of a U.S. Army officer, Atkinson holds a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago.
