Historic Birmingham and Jefferson County: An Illustrated History (review)

Book Reviews Historic Birmingham and Jefferson County: An Illustrated History. By James R. Bennett. San Antonio: Historical Publishing Network, 2008. 312 pp. $49.95. ISBN 978-1-89361-983-8. James Bennett has given readers an entertaining overview of the history of Jefferson County and Birmingham from the days of the Native Americans and early settlement to the high-technology industries of the twenty-first century. This coffee-table-style book appears to be aimed at the general reading public, but it will also be useful for students and the wider historical community. Roughly half the book comprises twelve chapters, several appendixes , and a bibliography. The remainder is a large sponsorship section containing “historic profiles of businesses, organizations, and families that have contributed to the development and economic base of Birmingham” (p. 197). The section includes profiles on the cities of Irondale, Leeds, Trussville, and Vestavia Hills, as well as the Tannehill Ironworks Historical State Park and numerous corporate and commercial enterprises located around the county. Profiles in this section are grouped into three categories: Quality of Life, the Marketplace, and Building a Greater Birmingham. For ease of use, the individual profiles within each category could have been arranged in alphabetical order, but an index at the end of the section does provide direct access to speci fic sponsor profiles. More than two hundred photographs, prints, and maps illustrate the main text. The images have been drawn from a wide variety of sources including the collections of the Birmingham Public Library, Samford University, the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), and the Iron and Steel Museum of Alabama, as well as from private individuals, the Library of Congress, University of Georgia Libraries, and Granger Collection of New York. The book’s twelfth chapter is comprised entirely of a list of one hundred “famous faces” hailing from the Birmingham metropolitan area, including portraits of thirty-six of these well-known individuals —the addition of the face of the statue of Vulcan is a humorous and appropriate addition. The sponsorship section contains two hundred additional images, mostly contemporary but also including some historical images. With more than four hundred black-and-white and color images throughout the book, this is truly an illustrated history. J U L Y 2 0 0 9 211 The book’s eleven chapters of historical text include the Indian Wars, Settlement, Iron Mongers, the Birth of Birmingham, the Gay Nineties, World Wars, Depression and the New Deal, the Civil Rights Era, Revival, and UAB. Following Chapter Five (“Recovery: The Birth of Birmingham”), the focus of the book shifts to the city while excluding the county and the other municipalities within. This may be understandable with the economic and social powerhouse that is Birmingham, but it does deviate from the book’s purported theme of a countywide illustrated history. Bennett begins his narrative with a discussion of the entrance of the first settlers into the Alabama territory and of the Native Americans they found living in the area. He ends with a brief overview of the metropolitan area’s population shift from Birmingham to other areas within the county and in the seven-county metropolitan area. Between these two topics, Bennett gives the reader an overview of much of the history of the area, from the iron industry to breweries, from slavery to Civil Rights, from the Civil War to World War II, from labor unions to healthcare and university medical centers, from movie theaters to restaurants, and from the Black Barons baseball team to the Barber motorsports park and museum. Social clubs, hotels, early religious institutions, colleges and universities, and shopping centers are all covered to some degree, with some topics obviously receiving more extensive coverage than others. While not totally detrimental to the book, minor but repeated copy editing errors do distract from the historical text. For instance, while a caption correctly lists a member of the “Jordan family,” the accompanying text twice mentions the “Jordon family” (p. 40). Cardiff is a city in Wales, not England (p. 56), and settlers arrived in the Bluff Park area well before the stated 1925 (p. 111...