Birmingham has seen 1400 years of growth, during which time it has evolved from a small 7th century Anglo Saxon hamlet on the edge of the Forest of Arden at the fringe of early Mercia into a major city. A combination of immigration, innovation and civic pride helped to bring about major social and economic reforms and create the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the growth of similar cities across the world.
Michael Laban Walzer is an American political theorist and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is editor emeritus of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics—many in political ethics—including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, Zionism, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation. He is also a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Harpers, and many philosophical and political science journals.
Birmingham was a parliamentary constituency of the House of Commons of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for the city of Birmingham, in what is now the West Midlands Metropolitan County, but at the time was Warwickshire.
Joseph Priestley was a British natural philosopher, political theorist, clergyman, theologian, and educator. He was one of the most influential Dissenters of the late 18th-century.
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West Midlands metropolitan county, and approximately 4.3 million in the wider metropolitan area. It is the largest UK metropolitan area outside of London. Birmingham is commonly referred to as the second city of the United Kingdom.
The Birmingham Gazette, known for much of its existence as Aris's Birmingham Gazette, was a newspaper that was published and circulated in Birmingham, England, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Founded as a weekly publication in 1741, it moved to daily production in 1862, and was absorbed by the Birmingham Post in 1956.
Liberation was a 20th-century pacifist journal published 1956 through 1977 in the United States. A bimonthly and later a monthly, the magazine identified in the 1960s with the New Left.
The Midlands Enlightenment, also known as the West Midlands Enlightenment or the Birmingham Enlightenment, was a scientific, economic, political, cultural and legal manifestation of the Age of Enlightenment that developed in Birmingham and the wider English Midlands during the second half of the eighteenth century.
John Ward was an English actor and theatre manager. The founder of the Warwickshire Company of Comedians – a Birmingham-based theatre company who toured throughout the West Midlands and into Wales during the mid to late eighteenth century – he was the first of the Kemble family theatrical dynasty, whose most notable member was his granddaughter Sarah Siddons. Ward was the first recorded performer of a Shakespearian play in Stratford-upon-Avon, and is also notable as the author of the two earliest surviving prompt books of Shakespeare's Hamlet, which reveal how the play was performed in eighteenth century England and also throw light on earlier practice.
The Birmingham Bean Club is a loyalist dining club founded in Birmingham, England shortly after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, serving as a forum for confidential discussion between the leading Tory citizens of the growing industrial town and the gentlemen of the surrounding counties. It both reflected and encouraged the 18th century establishment of Birmingham as the political hub of the surrounding region, seeking to accommodate the political implications of the development of Birmingham within the framework of the 18th century constitution. By the end of the century the club was described as including "representatives of the Magnates of the County, the Gentlemen and Tradespeople of the town, the Clergy and the officers from the Barracks, and the principal representative actors from the local theatre".
The Racial Preservation Society was a far-right pressure group opposed to immigration and in favour of white nationalism, national preservation and protection in the United Kingdom in the 1960s.
Freeth's Coffee House, the popular name for the Leicester Arms on the corner of Bell Street and Lease Lane in Birmingham, England, was a tavern and coffee house that operated from 1736 until 1832.
John Freeth, also known as Poet Freeth and who published his work under the pseudonym John Free, was an English innkeeper, poet and songwriter. As the owner of Freeth's Coffee House between 1768 and his death in 1808, he was major figure in the political and cultural life of Birmingham during the Midlands Enlightenment.
The Warwickshire Company of Comedians, also known as Mr Ward's Company of Comedians and after 1767 as Mr Kemble's Company of Comedians, was a theatre company established by John Ward in Birmingham, England in the 1740s, touring throughout the West Midlands region and surrounding counties over subsequent decades. Unusual in the 18th century as a provincial company producing performances to London tastes and standards, it is particularly notable as the origin of the Kemble family theatrical dynasty, which was to dominate the English stage in the late-18th and early 19th centuries. Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble in particular, who were Ward's grandchildren and whose careers began in the company, were the leading actress and actor of their time, and are still considered among the greatest performers in English theatrical history.
The literary tradition of Birmingham originally grew out of the culture of religious puritanism that developed in the town in the 16th and 17th centuries. Birmingham's location away from established centres of power, its dynamic merchant-based economy and its weak aristocracy gave it a reputation as a place where loyalty to the established power structures of church and feudal state were weak, and saw it emerge as a haven for free-thinkers and radicals, encouraging the birth of a vibrant culture of writing, printing and publishing.
The Royal Hotel, originally just The Hotel, was a hotel located on Temple Row in Birmingham, England. Opened in 1772, it was the first establishment in Birmingham to describe itself as a "hotel", a new term entering usage around this time to denote a more fashionable and genteel establishment than the more traditional inn.
The King Street Theatre was the first purpose-built theatre to open in Birmingham, England. The town had had earlier theatres, but the Theatre in Smallbrook Street, whose origins dated back to 1715, and Theatre in New Street, which was in an existence a few years later, were both makeshift structures; and the more substantial Moor Street Theatre, which opened in 1740, was a conversion of an existing building. King Street was a much more ambitious undertaking, being based on the examples of the established London patent theatres.
Classical music in Birmingham began in the late Middle Ages, mainly devotional music which did not survive the Reformation. Evidence is scant until the years following the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, when Birmingham's economy boomed. This was reflected in the scientific and cultural awakening known as the Midlands Enlightenment. The first sign of this transformation was the opening of the baroque St Philip's Church in 1715, which had a fine organ that attracted gifted musicians to the town.
Edward Burn (1762–1837) was an English cleric, known as a Calvinist Methodist preacher and polemical writer.
John Edwards (1768–1808) was an English nonconformist minister and political radical. He is best known as the successor of Joseph Priestley at the New Meeting House, Birmingham.
