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The Guns at Last Light: 1945 and Beyond with Rick Atkinson
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Free.Location: LAT/LONG: 39.811347, -77.225461
Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center
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This program program takes place at the Gettysburg National Military Park Museum and Visitor Center Theater.
This program is SOLD OUT.
Join Pulitzer Prize winning author and historian Rick Atkinson for a conversation on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s leadership, the craft of writing military history, and the legacy of World War II. This program will cover Atkinson’s acclaimed Liberation Trilogy on the Second World War, as well as his recent work on the American Revolution, including a discussion of Dwight Eisenhower, George Washington, and their shared leadership principles. This program will be followed by a book signing event with Rick Atkinson.
Rick Atkinson is two time Pulitzer Prize winning author, historian and journalist, who has written eight narrative histories about five American wars. His latest book, The Fate of the Day: The War for American, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, is the second volume in a trilogy he is authoring on the American Revolution. 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.” The second volume, The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, 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, published in May 2013, ranked #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The Wall Street Journal called it “a magnificent book,” and the New York Times Book Review described it as “a tapestry of fabulous richness and complexity…The Liberation Trilogy is a monumental achievement.” His other books include The British Are Coming, The Long Gray Line, In the Company of Soldiers, and Crusade.
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, 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.
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 previously served on the governing commission of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.
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.
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