(This program was originally broadcast on July 3, 2025)
In this encore edition of Midday, we revisit Tom Hall's conversation this past summer with the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Rick Atkinson.
After a 20-year career as a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor at the Washington Post, Atkinson — the son of a US Army Officer — began in 1989 to write about military history, including a three-volume series called The Liberation Trilogy, about World War II in Europe.
In 2019, he published the first of his three planned volumes about the American Revolutionary War, The British Are Coming, which chronicles the American rebellion against the British from 1775 — the year before the Declaration of Independence — until the year after.
The second volume of The Revolution Trilogy was published last spring (2025). It covers the middle years of the war for American independence, between 1777 and 1780, from the battle of Ticonderoga to the fall of Charleston. It’s called The Fate of the Day.
Rick Atkinson discusses his sweeping, granular exploration of the people, the politics, and the passions that animated American revolutionaries and British loyalists alike during the perilous middle years of the war, when victory for the rebels was far from certain. It is a meticulously researched and beautifully written account of the conflict that began the American experiment. And it provides timely testimony to the costs a democracy can demand of its citizens.
Rick Atkinson spoke with Tom via Zoom from Washington, DC on June 25, 2025.
(Because this program was recorded, we won't be taking any new calls or online comments)
