Byrd: To the Pole

To the Pole

The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925–1927

Edited by Raimund E. Goerler

On May 9, 1926, Richard E. Byrd announced to the world that he and copilot Floyd Bennett were the first to fly an airplane over the North Pole. Documents published here for the first time provide new insights into this most controversial accomplishment of Byrd's career.

To the Pole presents transcriptions of Byrd’s handwritten diary and notebook, which were discovered by Ohio State University archivist Raimund Goerler in 1996 when he was cataloging Byrd’s papers for the university. In his diary Byrd recorded his preparations for the North Pole flight, and he used it as a message pad to communicate with his pilot when the deafening noise from the plane's engines rendered verbal communication impossible.

Byrd also wrote his navigational calculations on the leaves of his diary, and photographs of these crucial pages are presented in the book as well, along with a copy of Byrd’s official report on the expedition to the National Geographic Society.

Also included in the book are portions of the diary dealing with Byrd’s earlier expedition to Greenland and his flight across the Atlantic in 1927. Goerler has written an introduction and epilogue providing historical context for Byrd’s achievements and biographical information on the rest of his extraordinary career. The volume is illustrated with maps and a number of photographs from the Byrd archive.

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Miller and Tucker: Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities

Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities

Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine and Twentieth-Century Urbanism

Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker

Cincinnati’s historic Over-the-Rhine neighborhood began in the nineteenth century as a nonelite suburb and became in the twentieth century an inner-city slum, burdened with a broad range of problems characteristic of such places everywhere in the United States. As Zane L. Miller and Bruce Tucker point out, however, Over-the-Rhine’s history is also the history of planning for both inner-city neighborhoods and big-city downtowns. Beginning in the 1920s, Cincinnati’s government and civic leaders explored the entire repertoire of policies and programs considered or implemented in cities throughout the country for such closed-in neighborhoods. The first set of attempts included schemes for comprehensive planning, zoning, slum clearance, redevelopment, and neighborhood conservation and rehabilitation.

Over-the-Rhine survived this first assault on the slums, but at mid-century a new understanding of the city generated different visions of Over-the-Rhine’s future and long and bitter fights for control of that future. While factions fought, the neighborhood deteriorated, and by the 1990s it was one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city. The story ends with a double irony: the adoption of an Over-the-Rhine “urban renewal” plan that endorsed a ghettoish status quo; and the murder of Buddy Gray, the city's premier white community organizer, by a mentally troubled man whom Gray had rescued from the streets and befriended.

Miller and Tucker look beyond the fight over slums to illuminate other issues in American civilization. They focus on changing concepts of culture, neighborhood, and community as dynamic factors, and basic components of city planning. Changing Plans for America’s Inner Cities is essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of urban neighborhoods.

http://www.ohiostatepress.org