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\"Birmingham is a city with an extraordinarily diverse achievement in fields as varied as science, industry, politics, education, medicine, printing and the arts. Labels such as the 'first industrial city', 'city of a thousand trades', 'the best-governed city in the world' and 'the youngest city in Europe' have been applied to the town. This new publication, the first major history of Birmingham since the 1970s, is published to commemorate the 850th anniversary of Birmingham's market charter in 1166, an event which marked the first step in the rise of Birmingham as a commercial and industrial powerhouse. Authored by scholars, but written for a general readership, this detailed, accessible and richly illustrated book is both a definitive reference work and a readable account of a diverse, culturally rich and high-achieving city. Many aspects of the history of Birmingham are presented for the first time outside academic publications: its diverse people's history, a rich prehistoric and Roman past, the rise of Birmingham in medieval and early modern times, the evolution of an innovative system of education, a varied experience in art and design and an extraordinary printing history. The book covers economic and political themes and new approaches to the history of society and culture. It is illustrated with many images which have never before been published either in books or on the web. The result is a visually stunning and factually illuminating book which will appeal to many kinds of people.\"-- Provided by publisher.

This book uses a case study to explore the contribution which scientific knowledge made to the growth trajectory of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The aim is not to re-tell the story of the Industrial Revolution, but to reconstruct its preliminary stage which is here labelled the Industrial Enlightenment.

National levels of personal health-care access and quality can be approximated by measuring mortality rates from causes that should not be fatal in the presence of effective medical care (ie, amenable mortality). Previous analyses of mortality amenable to health care only focused on high-income countries and faced several methodological challenges. In the present analysis, we use the highly standardised cause of death and risk factor estimates generated through the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) to improve and expand the quantification of personal health-care access and quality for 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2015. We mapped the most widely used list of causes amenable to personal health care developed by Nolte and McKee to 32 GBD causes. We accounted for variations in cause of death certification and misclassifications through the extensive data standardisation processes and redistribution algorithms developed for GBD. To isolate the effects of personal health-care access and quality, we risk-standardised cause-specific mortality rates for each geography-year by removing the joint effects of local environmental and behavioural risks, and adding back the global levels of risk exposure as estimated for GBD 2015. We employed principal component analysis to create a single, interpretable summary measure–the Healthcare Quality and Access (HAQ) Index–on a scale of 0 to 100. The HAQ Index showed strong convergence validity as compared with other health-system indicators, including health expenditure per capita (r=0·88), an index of 11 universal health coverage interventions (r=0·83), and human resources for health per 1000 (r=0·77). We used free disposal hull analysis with bootstrapping to produce a frontier based on the relationship between the HAQ Index and the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a measure of overall development consisting of income per capita, average years of education, and total fertility rates. This frontier allowed us to better quantify the maximum levels of personal health-care access and quality achieved across the development spectrum, and pinpoint geographies where gaps between observed and potential levels have narrowed or widened over time. Between 1990 and 2015, nearly all countries and territories saw their HAQ Index values improve; nonetheless, the difference between the highest and lowest observed HAQ Index was larger in 2015 than in 1990, ranging from 28·6 to 94·6. Of 195 geographies, 167 had statistically significant increases in HAQ Index levels since 1990, with South Korea, Turkey, Peru, China, and the Maldives recording among the largest gains by 2015. Performance on the HAQ Index and individual causes showed distinct patterns by region and level of development, yet substantial heterogeneities emerged for several causes, including cancers in highest-SDI countries; chronic kidney disease, diabetes, diarrhoeal diseases, and lower respiratory infections among middle-SDI countries; and measles and tetanus among lowest-SDI countries. While the global HAQ Index average rose from 40·7 (95% uncertainty interval, 39·0–42·8) in 1990 to 53·7 (52·2–55·4) in 2015, far less progress occurred in narrowing the gap between observed HAQ Index values and maximum levels achieved; at the global level, the difference between the observed and frontier HAQ Index only decreased from 21·2 in 1990 to 20·1 in 2015. If every country and territory had achieved the highest observed HAQ Index by their corresponding level of SDI, the global average would have been 73·8 in 2015. Several countries, particularly in eastern and western sub-Saharan Africa, reached HAQ Index values similar to or beyond their development levels, whereas others, namely in southern sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia, lagged behind what geographies of similar development attained between 1990 and 2015. This novel extension of the GBD Study shows the untapped potential for personal health-care access and quality improvement across the development spectrum. Amid substantive advances in personal health care at the national level, heterogeneous patterns for individual causes in given countries or territories suggest that few places have consistently achieved optimal health-care access and quality across health-system functions and therapeutic areas. This is especially evident in middle-SDI countries, many of which have recently undergone or are currently experiencing epidemiological transitions. The HAQ Index, if paired with other measures of health-system characteristics such as intervention coverage, could provide a robust avenue for tracking progress on universal health coverage and identifying local priorities for strengthening personal health-care quality and access throughout the world. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Told through the voice of a fictional eyewitness, the events of the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Alabama in 1963 by the Ku Klux Klan and its effects on the Civil Rights Movement is presented.

\"A masterpiece that deserves to be ranked with such seminal and influential works as Cash's Mind of the South.\" --Edwin T.Layton Jr., author of The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Profession This pathbreaking book tells the dramatic story of a unique manufacturing complex and the city that it helped to create.

Learn about the bomb blast that rocked the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, killing four young girls.

One of Planetizen's Top Ten Books of 2006 \"But for Birmingham,\" Fred Shuttleworth recalled President John F. Kennedy saying in June 1963 when he invited black leaders to meet with him, \"we would not be here today.\" Birmingham is well known for its civil rights history, particularly for the violent white-on-black bombings that occurred there in the 1960s, resulting in the city's nickname \"Bombingham.\" What is less well known about Birmingham's racial history, however, is the extent to which early city planning decisions influenced and prompted the city's civil rights protests. The first book-length work to analyze this connection,\"The Most Segregated City in America\": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920-1980uncovers the impact of Birmingham's urban planning decisions on its black communities and reveals how these decisions led directly to the civil rights movement. Spanning over sixty years, Charles E. Connerly's study begins in the 1920s, when Birmingham used urban planning as an excuse to implement racial zoning laws, pointedly sidestepping the 1917 U.S. Supreme Court Buchanan v. Warley decision that had struck down racial zoning. The result of this obstruction was the South's longest-standing racial zoning law, which lasted from 1926 to 1951, when it was redeclared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the fact that African Americans constituted at least 38 percent of Birmingham's residents, they faced drastic limitations to their freedom to choose where to live. When in the1940s they rebelled by attempting to purchase homes in off-limit areas, their efforts were labeled as a challenge to city planning, resulting in government and court interventions that became violent. More than fifty bombings ensued between 1947 and 1966, becoming nationally publicized only in 1963, when four black girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Connerly effectively uses Birmingham's history as an example to argue the importance of recognizing the link that exists between city planning and civil rights. His demonstration of how Birmingham's race-based planning legacy led to the confrontations that culminated in the city's struggle for civil rights provides a fresh lens on the history and future of urban planning, and its relation to race.