Birmingham ( BUR-ming-ham) is a city in the north central region of the U.S. state of Alabama. With an estimated 2019 population of 209,403, it is the most populous city in Alabama. Birmingham is the seat of Jefferson County, Alabama’s most populous and fifth largest county. As of 2018, the Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 1,151,801, making it the most populous in Alabama and 49th-most populous in the United States. Birmingham serves as an important regional hub and is associated with the Deep South, Piedmont, and Appalachian regions of the nation.

Birmingham was founded in 1871, during the post–Civil War Reconstruction era, through the merger of three farm towns, most notably Elyton. The new city was named for Birmingham, England, the United Kingdom’s second largest city and then a major industrial city. The Alabama city annexed its smaller neighbors as it developed into a major industrial center based on mining, the iron and steel industry, and rail transport. Most of the original settlers were of English ancestry. The city was developed as a place where low paid, non-unionized immigrants (mainly Irish and Italian), along with African-Americans from rural Alabama, who worked in the city’s steel mills and blast furnaces and gave it a competitive advantage over unionized industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast.

From its founding through the end of the 1960s, Birmingham was a primary industrial center of the southern United States. Its rapid growth from 1881 through 1920 earned it the nicknames “The Magic City” and “The Pittsburgh of the South”. Its major industries were iron and steel production. Major components of the railroad industry, including rails and railroad cars, were made in Birmingham. The two primary hubs of railroading in the “Deep South” have been Birmingham and Atlanta. The economy began to diversify in the latter half of the twentieth century, as the steel mills began to shut down. Banking, telecommunications, transportation, electrical power transmission, medical care, college education, and insurance have become its major economic activities. Birmingham now ranks as one of the largest banking centers in the U.S. It is also one of the important business centers of the Southeast.

In higher education, the Birmingham area has major colleges of medicine, dentistry, optometry, occupational therapy, physical therapy, pharmacy, law, engineering, and nursing. Birmingham has been the location of the University of Alabama School of Medicine (formerly the Medical College of Alabama) and the University of Alabama School of Dentistry since 1947. In 1969, it gained the University of Alabama at Birmingham, one of three main campuses of the University of Alabama System. It is also home to three private colleges: Samford University, Birmingham-Southern College, and Miles College. The city has three of the state’s five law schools: Cumberland School of Law, Birmingham School of Law, and Miles Law School. Jefferson State and Lawson State Community Colleges are also located in the city. Birmingham is also the headquarters of the Southwestern Athletic Conference and the Southeastern Conference, one of the major U.S. collegiate athletic conferences.