James Madison Lecture Series Welcomes Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Rick Atkinson
The James Madison Memorial Fellowship Foundation is pleased to announce that Rick Atkinson, acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, will be the featured speaker for the James Madison Lecture on June 26, 2025. His talk, “America at 250: The Revolution That Made a Republic,” will take place from 6-7 p.m. at Marymount University, Ballston Campus, Classroom Building, located at 1000 N. Glebe Road, Arlington, VA. The lecture is open to all James Madison Fellows, alumni James Madison Fellows, and the public. A reception will follow the lecture.
Rick Atkinson is the author of eight narrative histories about five American wars. His most recent book, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, spent nearly three months on the New York Times bestseller list in 2019 and is the first volume in a trilogy on the American Revolution. The second volume of the Revolution Trilogy, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, will be published this month.
Atkinson previously 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, received the Pulitzer Prize and was acclaimed by the Wall Street Journal as “the best World War II battle narrative since Cornelius Ryan’s classics, The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far.”
Atkinson’s many awards include the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for history; the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting; and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service. He has also received 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.
In 2020, The British Are Coming won the George Washington Prize for the year’s best work on the American founding era; the New-York Historical Society’s Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize, awarded annually to the best work in the field of American history and biography; the “Excellence in American History Book Award” of the Daughters of the American Revolution; and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.
Born in Munich, Germany, Atkinson is the son of a U.S. Army officer and grew up on military posts. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from East Carolina University and a Master of Arts degree in English literature from the University of Chicago. He and his wife, Dr. Jane Chestnut Atkinson of Lawrence, Kan., a retired researcher and clinician at the National Institutes of Health, live in the District of Columbia. They have two grown children and four grandchildren.