Today the Bureau of Governmental Research (BGR) announces Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist and bestselling author, as its 2025 Annual Luncheon speaker.
The luncheon will take place on Tuesday, October 21, at noon at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside hotel, located at 2 Poydras Street in downtown New Orleans. Doors open at 11:30 a.m.
Tables and individual tickets for the 2025 Annual Luncheon are now available for purchase through BGR, give.bgr.org/luncheon or (504) 525-1734. Proceeds from the event will support BGR’s core activities, which include government monitoring, policy analysis, publication of reports and post-publication implementation work.
Mr. Atkinson will discuss his historical research on the American Revolution as we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation next year.
His presentation to BGR, entitled “The Fate of the Day: America and Our Revolution at 250,” is part of BGR’s Janet Howard Speaker Series in Governmental Research.
Rick Atkinson photo by Elliott O’Donovan
“BGR is excited to welcome Rick Atkinson as our keynote speaker this year, and he continues our tradition of presenting some of the country’s most respected thought leaders to headline our Annual Luncheon,” said BGR President and CEO Rebecca Mowbray. “As an organization committed to building a healthy democracy at the local level, BGR looks forward to his insights on the birth of American democracy and the lessons we can carry forward today.”
Rick Atkinson is the author of eight narrative histories about five American wars. The first volume in his trilogy on the American Revolution, 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. He recently published the second volume, The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780, which debuted in 2025 as the #1 New York Times nonfiction bestseller. Filmmaker Ken Burns, who has consulted extensively with Mr. Atkinson for his upcoming PBS documentary on the American Revolution, wrote, “Rick Atkinson takes his place among the greatest of all historians. This superb second volume in his Revolution Trilogy is that rare narrative that keeps you on the edge of your seat.”
Mr. 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.”
Mr. Atkinson is the bestselling author of The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966, and Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War. He also wrote In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The New York Times Book Review called the book “the most intimate, vivid, and well-informed account yet published” about that war, and Newsweek cited it as one of the ten best books of 2004. He is the lead essayist in Where Valor Rests: Arlington National Cemetery, published by National Geographic in 2007, and the volume editor of Cornelius Ryan, an anthology published by Library of America in 2019.
Mr. Atkinson’s 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 the winner of numerous other awards and honors, including the 1989 George Polk Award for national reporting and the 2015 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, previously given to Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and David McCullough. In 2020, The British Are Coming won the George Washington Prize for the year’s best work on the American founding era. 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.
For two decades, Mr. Atkinson worked as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and senior editor 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. Previously he served as the assistant managing editor for investigations. Atkinson’s journalism career began at the Pittsburg (Kansas) Morning Sun in 1976; in 1977, he moved to The Kansas City Times, before going to The Washington Post in 1983. Among other assignments, he served as the Post’s Berlin bureau chief, covering not only Germany and NATO, but also spending considerable time in Somalia and Bosnia.
Born in Munich, Germany, Mr. 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, one of whom is a 2007 graduate of Tulane University.
This year’s BGR luncheon is sponsored by Hancock Whitney Bank and Ochsner Health, with additional support from Delta Utilities and IMTT. The luncheon will begin at 12 p.m. on Tuesday, October 21, with doors opening at 11:30 a.m. The Garden District Book Shop will be selling autographed copies of The Fate of the Day on-site from approximately 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
To purchase a table or tickets, visit give.bgr.org/luncheon or contact Heather Sweeney at (504) 525-1734 or hsweeney@bgr.org. Event seating is limited and will be allocated on a first-purchased basis.
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BGR is a private, nonprofit, independent research organization. Since its founding in 1932, it has been dedicated to informed public policymaking and the effective use of public resources in the Greater New Orleans area. For more information, call (504) 525-4152 or visit BGR’s website, www.bgr.org.
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