This week The Extraordinary Times caught up with Anne Delano Steinert, founding Board Chair and Vice President for Fundraising at the Over-the-Rhine Museum. The Over-the-Rhine Museum is a new immersive urban history museum soon to open to the public on Cincinnati’s West McMicken Avenue. Steinert was recently featured on WVXU’s Cincinnati Edition, where she and fellow guests discussed the mission of this exciting new museum housed in a historic tenement space. Steinert is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Cincinnati. She holds degrees in historic preservation from Goucher College and Columbia University, as well as an M.A. and PhD in Urban History and Public History from the University of Cincinnati.
* Describe how the Over-the-Rhine Museum got started Up until the most recent wave of newcomers, history had been well preserved in Over-the-Rhine. Very little change had taken place since the Great Depression, so the buildings were these little time capsules going all the way back in the 19th century. Things like heating and plumbing and furniture in the buildings were preserved because so little had been updated. As Over-the-Rhine evolved, a more affluent population wanted bigger kitchens, more spacious bathrooms, and larger apartments. As all that change took place, the buildings were being drastically altered. The long-term residents of Over-the-Rhine, meanwhile, saw their rents increase and their taxes go up, so a lot of those people also were being lost. The Over-the-Rhine museum is an attempt to preserve and protect and celebrate all those stories that Over-the-Rhine has to tell, embedded in the physical fabric of the neighborhood, the buildings, and the streetscape, but also the stories of to residents who may or may not have been able to stay in the neighborhood. * What makes the museum unique in Greater Cincinnati? One thing that stands out is that it tells the story of everyday ordinary people. It's not—for example—the home of William Howard Taft, who was wealthy and prominent and powerful. It’s the story of folks who are living their everyday lives: people who immigrated, who worked hard every day for a living, people suffering with poverty or health care, issues people who suffered discrimination of one sort or the other. The other thing is that it's immersive. It's not the kind of place where you read things on a wall. You will instead feel like you’ve traveled back in time, like you're immersed in someone's life. We’ll be creating six different spaces for six different moments in time, where you'll experience what life was like for different families. You'll see what their furnishings look like, you'll see how big or small their apartment was. You might hear the kinds of music that they were listening to. It will be experience rather than something mediated by a curator or where there's something between you and the experience—you will be in the experience. * What is the role of oral history in expanding the impact of the museum? In our research we identified over 150 families and businesses that have occupied the building, which was built in the early 1860s and was occupied until around 2008. As we've been doing that research, there are better archival or documentary sources for the deep history of 1860s through the 1950s, but the closer we get the present, the harder it is to find written sources that have been archived. So oral history allows us to capture the memories and stories of folks who lived and worked and played in Over-the-Rhine. We have some oral history stories going back to the 1940s and 1950s, so we can capture this world in a way that we could not really do from what's otherwise available. The United States Census is a great source, for example, but the full records are only publicly available to researchers up to 1950. Oral history also adds significant richness to the story. Even when we look at, say, the Fettweis family who built the two buildings where the museum is housed in the 1860s and in the 1870s, we have lots of archival information but it's still very flat. lt isn't rich in the in the same way you get from an oral history of someone’s story, which pulls you in and gives you a kind of a sensory connection—I feel like that way of learning about the past is just so much richer. * Is there anything you would like to share finally with the readers of this blog about how they can find out more or get involved? One thing I would add is that we have a wonderful walking tour program, “Walking the Stories.” I really encourage people to sign up! The other thing is that this project is a labor of love pulled together by history enthusiasts. We really are a grassroots effort and rely on funding from the public. If this project sounds exciting or interesting, we encourage people to donate or to get involved. They can reach out to me or get in touch by email: [email protected].
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Blockbusters are like buses: you wait forever for one to show up, then two come along at once. However transparent this summer’s “Barbenheimer” hype, Hollywood is finally figuring out how to fill theater seats in an age of post-pandemic fatigue and streaming overload. At the time of writing, Barbie has raked in an eye-popping $780 million in global box office. Its unlikely rival Oppenheimer has earned $400 million, putting it on track to become one of the highest earning biopics of all time. While bubblegum-pink comedies in alternate plastic universes might not be this reviewer’s cup of tea, it is refreshing to see moviegoers coming together in search of a shared experience, whatever that experience might be. But this review is about something entirely different. Yesterday, I caught a matinee screening of the other movie, surrounded by a few old geezers. While Barbie likely pulled in more business at this particular theater, I was eager for the latest offering by the magnificent Christopher Nolan.
Oppenheimer does not disappoint, even as it defies expectations. Drawing on Kai Bird’s and Martin Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus, Nolan’s three-hour study of the tortured genius behind the Manhattan Project is simply a masterpiece—not flawless, by any means, but so engrossing that its run time never drags. Whether the experience would carry to an I-Pad screen or a laptop seems doubtful. For a film about the atom bomb, the explosions are spare, sometimes hinted obliquely in the surreal special effects that illustrate the title character’s stream of consciousness, but only once revealed in full force, midway through the movie. Although Nolan’s filmography includes superhero and action movies (The Dark Knight, Tenet) which climax in pyrotechnics, the decision here is made to depict the Trinity test in the deserts of New Mexico rather than the more notorious bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This choice is laudable and compelling: audiences share in the anxiety of Oppenheimer and his colleagues as the detonator implodes (one theory—a “near zero” probability--hypothesized the atom bomb would ignite an unstoppable chain-reaction, incinerating Earth’s atmosphere. Oppenheimer went ahead anyway.) The ensuing blast is one of the most strangely beautiful scenes ever depicted in film. Nolan’s film works best, however, as a human drama, which just happens to be about the atom bomb. Critics might complain that the brutal incineration of Japanese civilians is underplayed, but much of the conflict at the heart of this movie revolves around the dark and problematic realization of a monstrous but arguably inevitable technology. Though troubled by the bomb’s implications, Oppenheimer rationalizes its use. Whether or not America can be trusted with such a weapon, the Nazis certainly can’t. One of the chilling themes of Oppenheimer is how close Hitler came to the atomic bomb, though hampered ironically by racist policies (Oppenheimer and many of the Manhattan Project’s diverse team, including numerous refugees, were Jewish). Like the Greek Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, Oppenheimer’s reward for his labors was to be chained (metaphorically) to a rock for eternity. Though celebrated on the cover of Time magazine, Oppenheimer sadly fell foul of the prevailing McCarthyism of 1950s, tarnished by innuendo (though Oppenheimer moved in left-leaning intellectual circles, he was never a card-carrying communist, much less a Soviet agent). Most pitiful was the vendetta waged against Oppenheimer by Lewis Strauss, Chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, around which much of the film is organized. Strauss, whose vindictiveness eventually sank his own political ambition, is played with Machiavellian glee by Robert Downey, Jr. A star-studded cast also includes Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, and Gary Oldman in a memorable cameo as Harry S. Truman. Tom Conte as Albert Einstein is a particular treat. But special mention belongs to Irish actor Cillian Murphy, a stalwart in Nolan’s films, cast here in his first leading role for the director. Murphy nails down the nervous energy and haunted dignity of the brilliant but troubled Oppenheimer, conveying more emotion in a single gaze or gesture than most actors could evoke in a thousand lines. He surely deserves Best Actor at next year’s Academy Awards, but there’s no accounting for taste in this summer of Barbenheimer. Grade: A+ |
AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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