The volume is multi-disciplinary in content, including contributions from specialists in architecture, public and community arts, photography and urban studies - their critical perspectives linked by interest in urban visual culture.

Birmingham, the cradle of the industrial revolution and the world's first manufacturing town, is an important focus for many family historians who will find that their trail leads through it. Rural migrants, Quakers, Jews, Irish, Italians, and more recently people from the Caribbean, South-Asia and China have all made Birmingham their home. This vibrant history is reflected in the city's rich collections of records, and Michael Sharpe's handbook is the ideal guide to them. ?He introduces readers to the wealth of information available, providing an essential guide for anyone researching the history of the city or the life of an individual ancestor. His work addresses novices and experienced researchers alike and offers a compendium of sources from legal and ecclesiastical archives, to the records of local government, employers, institutions, clubs, societies and schools. Accessible, informative and extensively referenced, it is the perfect companion for research in Britain's second city.

Renewing Birmingham is the first book-length study of how federal funding helped transform a twentieth-century southern city. Christopher MacGregor Scribner shows that such funding not only aided Birmingham's transition from an industrial to a service economy but also led to redrawn avenues of power, influence, and justice in the city. By the 1960s Alabama's largest city faced wrenching changes brought on by economic decline, suburbanization, and racial tension. Decades in the making, these problems pitted old-guard politicians, manufacturing elites, and working-class whites against an alternative vision, kindled by federal dollars, of Birmingham's future. Scribner uses the Birmingham experience to trace the evolution of federal grants from extensions of Depression-era fiscal policy to instruments of social change. As he discusses federal backing of projects ranging from low-income housing to the University of Alabama Medical College, Scribner also shows how control of the grant purse, which once belonged exclusively to politicians, came to be shared with bureaucrats and activists, local and federal participants, and blacks and whites. Most important in Birmingham's case, debates over spending drew in entrepreneurs in fields as diverse as biomedicine and education, real estate and construction. This complicated bargaining and coalition-building sparked a "quiet revolution" that had begun hollowing out the core of Birmingham's old order even as civil rights protests cemented the city's segregationist reputation. Scribner stresses that the social benefits of Birmingham's economic rebirth reflected not so much a change of heart for the city as an admission that segregation was simply bad for business. As a new Birmingham ascended--and became less distinguishable from other American cities--aspects of its racist, elitist past persisted. In learning the particulars of Birmingham we come closer to understanding how the South can be at odds with the rest of the country even as it participates in national trends.

For decades, the Christmas season in Birmingham was not complete without the sights and sounds of the retail district. During the season, the Magic City made magic with elaborate light displays and the Living Christmas Tree in Woodrow Wilson Park. Many remember the battling Santas of Loveman's and Pizitz, each vying for the hearts of the community. The elaborate Enchanted Forest dazzled shoppers on the sixth floor at Pizitz. In the 1940s, more than 200,000 people lined the streets each year to make merry for the Christmas Carnival parade. Author and local historian Tim Hollis celebrates the happy history of Birmingham's holiday season, reviving the traditions and festivities, the food and shopping of days gone by.

This book attempts to present the beginning of North Birmingham as a city of its own. It is filled with early reports of happenings in North Birmingham, both as a city of its own and during the transition into the City of Birmingham