The Birmingham Group

The focus of this study is the collective of writers known variously as the Birmingham Group, the Birmingham School or the Birmingham Proletarian Writers who were active in the City of Birmingham in the decade prior to the Second World War. Their narratives chronicle the lived-experience of their fellow citizens in the urban manufacturing centre which had by this time become Britain’s second city. Presumed ‘guilty by association’ with a working-class literature considered overtly propagandistic, formally conservative, or merely the naive emulation of bourgeois realism, their narratives have in consequence suffered undue critical neglect. This book repudiates such assertions by arguing that their works not only contrast markedly with other examples of working-class writing produced in the 1930s but also prove themselves responsive to recent critical assessments seeking a more holistic and intersectional approach to issues of working-class identity.

Birmingham, Alabama looms large in the history of the twentieth-century black freedom struggle, but to date historians have mostly neglected the years after 1963. Here, author Robert Widell explores the evolution of Birmingham black activism into the 1970s, providing a valuable local perspective on the "long" black freedom struggle.

This study, first published in 1997, attempts to fill a gap in the historiography of the African American church by analysing the role and place of the African American church in one city, Birmingham, Alabama. It traces the roles and functions of the church from the arrival of African Americans as slaves in the early 1800s to 1963, the year that the civil rights movement reached a peak in the city. This title will be of interest to students of nineteenth- and twentieth-century religious and social history.

This well-written volume explores the relationships between politics and welfare programs for low-income residents in Birmingham during four periods in the twentieth century: • 1900-1917, the formative period of city building when welfare was predominantly a responsibility of the private sector; • 1928-1941, when the Great Depression devastated the local economy and federal intervention became the principal means of meeting human need; • the mid 1950s, when the lasting impacts of the New Deal could be assessed and when matters of race relations became increasingly significant; • 1962-1975, when an intense period of local government reform, the Civil Rights movement, federal intervention in the form of the War on Poverty, and increasing demands for citizen participation all reinforced one another. From the time of its founding in 1871, Birmingham has had a biracial population, so the theme of race relations runs naturally throughout the narrative. LaMonte pays particular attention to those efforts to achieve a more harmonious biracial community, including the failed effort to establish an Urban League in the 1940s, the progressive activities of the Community Chest’s Interracial Division in the 1950s, which were abruptly terminated, and the dramatic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when local events were elevated to international significance.

This is a detailed, authoritative, and easy-to-use guide to the architectural wealth of England's second city, the "workshop of the world." Birmingham's major buildings include its splendid English Baroque cathedral, pioneering Neo-Roman town hall, and still controversial Central Library of the 1970s. Streets of rich and varied Victorian and Edwardian architecture bear witness to an earlier era when Birmingham's civic initiatives were the admiration of the country. More recently, the city has been rejuvenated with architecture on a giant scale, including the iconoclastic Selfridges and the canalside precinct of Brindleyplace, where Modernism and Classical Revival are excitingly juxtaposed. The guide also explores a variety of outer districts and suburbs, among them the famous Jewellery Quarter, the stucco villas of Edgbaston, and Cadbury's celebrated Garden Suburb at Bournville. A connecting theme is provided by the local Arts and Crafts school, which flourished well into the twentieth century.