The Monday American

I knew I was in love with literature really early on in my life. My parents read to me and my sisters and then with us and then took us to the library weekly as kids and teenagers. Reading was built into us and I loved it. But it wasn’t until high school that I realized I loved history too. That was the first time I had major reading assignments from a history textbook and a really good history teacher. She expected us to read the chapter and then she would lecture through the material. The book gave me all the facts and dates and names, but she connected everything.

See, when she lectured she was a storyteller, weaving the people together and explaining why things happened the way they did and when they did. Those stories showed me that history was so much like literature, except it really happened. That may sound like an obvious revelation, but Andrew Gehrt from The Monday American agrees that the connection between narrative and history is often far from clear.

Basically I take stories from American history and I try to keep a story within history. A lot of history gets taught and the story gets taken out of it, and that kind of doesn’t do justice to it.

The Monday American covers all aspects of American history from the Korean War to JFK, including listener suggestions and special guests from a variety of podcasts. The whole thing comes together through the storyteller and history major Andrew Gehrt and is targeted for novices and experts alike.

I try to take stories from American history with enough research that an avid history buff would be entertained and learn something new but present it in a way that’s entertaining for someone that’s never had an interest in history before.

See, Andrew has always been a history person, but when he went looking for a podcast focusing on American history, he didn’t like anything he found. He decided to start his own show, which in a way feeds into his love for studying history. And it has to be a labor of love, with Andrew clocking around one hundred hours of work per episode.

[One of my favorite things] is all the history research I get to do on my own. It’s a nerdy guilty pleasure, I guess. I just get to study a lot of American history… I try to give at least five pretty good primary sources per episode, plus other research, recording, and editing.

Of course, all of that research creates a challenge, and Andrew says the ability to reveal the narrative in all of the facts and quotes he finds is something that he is still working to perfect. But he is excited to keep getting better to show people “the why things happen.”

As his listenership continues to grow, Andrew is excited to show more people that “why,” as well as show people who have never been interested in history the way that it affects our world today. So, if you’re a history lover or you completely slept through your American history classes, The Monday American is your show for the story in history.

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