A first edition, Insiders' Guide to Birmingham is the essential source for in-depth travel and relocation information to "The Magic City". Written by a local (and true insider), this guide offers a personal and practical perspective of Birmingham and its surrounding environs.

In 1963, Birmingham was the scene of some of the worst racial violence of the civil rights era. Police commissioner "Bull" Connor loosed dogs and turned fire hoses on black demonstrators; four young girls at Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded in a black church; and Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, defending his activism to fellow ministers.

Birmingham native Paul Hemphill, disillusioned with his hometown, had left home to pursue a journalistic career, so he witnessed these historic events with the rest of the world through newspaper and television reports. "That grim old steel town," he writes, "was the most blatantly segregated city of its size in the United States of America, and most of us regarded it with the same morbid fascination that causes us to slow down and gawk at a bloody wreck on the highway."

Thirty years later, Hemphill returned to Birmingham to explore the depths of change that had taken place in the decades since the violence. In this powerful memoir, he interweaves his own autobiography with the history of the city and the stories of two very different Birmingham residents: a wealthy white matron and the pastor of the city's largest black church. As he struggles to come to terms with his own conflicting feelings toward his father's attitudes, Hemphill finds ironic justice in the integration of his childhood neighborhood and a visit with the black family who moved into his family's former home.

Landscape of Transformations presents a history of Birmingham’s built environment and chronicles the development of the city as it became the dominant industrial powerhouse of the South during the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. This is a work of broad cultural interpretation, integrating industrial and commercial architecture, planned subdivision development, and the housing of the urban poor, while emphasizing the city’s many transformations.

In an unusual approach, Michael W. Fazio interprets the human constructions and natural landscapes of Birmingham as his text, a medium in which society has not only located and contained itself but also encoded its values for subsequent generations. Fazio allows this landscape to speak openly, sometimes eloquently, and even tragically about historical events. For example, on the civil rights struggle, rather than delving exclusively into political machinations and social structure, the author considers some of the city’s most important civil rights developments through their physical contexts—the buildings, streets, and landscapes where they took place—and looks for meaning in them.

In addition, Fazio traces the history of Birmingham through the events, circumstances, and personalities that have shaped the city. The book begins with an exploration of the preindustrial landscape, continues with a look at the development of the iron and steel industries, and culminates with an analysis of the planning developments that produced the University of Alabama in Birmingham and its medical center, which replaced declining heavy industry as foundations of the local economy.

Richly illustrated with black-and-white and color photographs, maps, and drawings, Landscape of Transformations is one of the few studies to focus on industrial cities of the “heartland.” Architectural historians, urban planners, and historic preservationists will be fascinated by this profound story of coal, iron, architecture, and the people behind the emerging personality of a leading southern city.

Michael W. Fazio is professor emeritus in the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. He is coauthor of Buildings Across Time: An Introduction to World Architecture and The Domestic Architecture of Benjamin Henry Latrobe.