Birmingham is a city in the Jones Valley of North central Alabama at the Southern end of the Appalachian Mountains.

Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, and part of the city is in Shelby County. It is the largest city in Alabama and is a regional hub of transportation, commercial, and cultural activity. The city also is a health-care center for the surrounding region.

The site was first settled by Europeans in 1813 as the town of Elyton. The area’s rich iron-ore deposits were used during the American Civil War (1861-1865), when the Confederates built a blast furnace.

In 1870, the modern city was founded at the intersection of two newly constructed railroads and named by a land company for Birmingham, England. The city incorporated in 1871.

Besides iron ore, the area had deposits of coal, limestone, bauxite, and sand. The city grew rapidly as an industrial center after 1899, when steel was first manufactured.

Birmingham was a major iron- and steel-producing center and as such was known as the Pittsburgh of the South. With the decline of the steel industry in the 1970s, city leaders successfully implemented a plan to diversify the area’s economy.

In the 1960s, as one of the South’s most segregated cities, Birmingham was a focus of the civil rights movement. In early 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil-rights leaders organized large demonstrations at lunch counters and other sites to protest racial discrimination.

When city police attacked the peaceful demonstrators with police dogs and fire hoses, media coverage triggered a national outcry. Here King wrote his famous "Letter from Birmingham Jail", in which he argued that individuals have the right to disobey unjust laws.

On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, claiming the lives of four young black girls: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley. Four members of the Ku Klux Klan were accused of the crime. Three men were eventually convicted—one in 1977, one in 2001, and one in 2002.

Both the demonstrations and the bombing helped the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed racial segregation.

In 1979 Richard Arrington, Jr. was elected Birmingham’s first black mayor.