Birmingham was a village worth only one pound in the Domesday Survey, yet it rose to become the second city of the British Empire with a population that passed a million. Its growth began when Peter de Birmingham obtained a market charter in 1154 for his little settlement by an insignificant river, with all roads leading to its all-important market-place, the great triangular Bull Ring, with the parish church of St Martin's in the middle. In the succeeding centuries, Birmingham has been a product of market forces, as a market of agriculture, trade and metal work.By the 18th century, Birmingham overtook Coventry as the biggest town in Warwickshire and by 1800 it was 'the toy shop of Europe', having cornered the markets for gun-making, jewellery, buttons and buckles with a bewildering variety of specialist craftsmen and traders. The factory system had already begun and men like James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley and William Murdock made Birmingham the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, selling their wares in vast quantities to the entire world. The middle of the 19th century saw Birmingham pioneering political reform, education and municipal government.In this first single-volume history of the city for half a century, Dr Upton looks at why Birmingham grew and what it has become. It has always been a place in which to experiment, from the steam engine to the factory in a garden; from the Bull Ring to Spaghetti Junction. To some, the story of Birmingham is one of great industries: Boulton and Watt, Dunlop, Cadbury's, G.K.N., Lloyd's Bank and Austin Rover. But there are many lesser known tales: of the Bull Ring Riots, the Onion Fair, the first floodlit football matches and the tripe sellers. It is a story of communities, too. The Quakers settles in the 17th century, the Irish and Italians in the 19th and, more recently, people from the Caribbean, the Indian subcontinent, China and Vietnam have all made Birmingham their home.As Birmingham makes it marks on the map of Europe again, one thing is certain... the story of the city that brought us Joseph and Neville Chamberlain, Thomas the Tank Engine, Fu Manchu and Mendelssohn's Elijah can hardly be dull. Chris Upton's lively account ensures that Birmingham's fascinating story loses nothing in telling.

This new, factually rich and visually stunning publication is the first major history of Birmingham for more than four decades.

An illustrated history of Birmingham (AL) Terminal Station, from 1909 to 1969

Now with a new afterword, the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatic account of the civil rights era’s climactic battle in Birmingham as the movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., brought down the institutions of segregation. "The Year of Birmingham," 1963, was a cataclysmic turning point in America’s long civil rights struggle. Child demonstrators faced down police dogs and fire hoses in huge nonviolent marches against segregation. Ku Klux Klansmen retaliated by bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. Diane McWhorter, daughter of a prominent Birmingham family, weaves together police and FBI records, archival documents, interviews with black activists and Klansmen, and personal memories into an extraordinary narrative of the personalities and events that brought about America’s second emancipation. In a new afterword—reporting last encounters with hero Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and describing the current drastic anti-immigration laws in Alabama—the author demonstrates that Alabama remains a civil rights crucible.

Birmingham served as the stage for some of the most dramatic and important moments in the history of the civil rights struggle. In this vivid narrative account, Glenn Eskew traces the evolution of nonviolent protest in the city, focusing particularly on the sometimes problematic intersection of the local and national movements. Eskew describes the changing face of Birmingham's civil rights campaign, from the politics of accommodation practiced by the city's black bourgeoisie in the 1950s to local pastor Fred L. Shuttlesworth's groundbreaking use of nonviolent direct action to challenge segregation during the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1963, the national movement, in the person of Martin Luther King Jr., turned to Birmingham. The national uproar that followed on Police Commissioner Bull Connor's use of dogs and fire hoses against the demonstrators provided the impetus behind passage of the watershed Civil Rights Act of 1964. Paradoxically, though, the larger victory won in the streets of Birmingham did little for many of the city's black citizens, argues Eskew. The cancellation of protest marches before any clear-cut gains had been made left Shuttlesworth feeling betrayed even as King claimed a personal victory. While African Americans were admitted to the leadership of the city, the way power was exercised--and for whom--remained fundamentally unchanged.