New Lights in the Valley: The Emergence of UAB - Hardcover

McWilliams, Dr. Tennant

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0817315462 ISBN 13: 9780817315467

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2007

Synopsis

A scholarly narrative of UAB from its nascent beginnings through the mid 1990s.

While the economy and culture of the post—World War II South changed from an era of material capital (e.g., cotton and iron ore) to a period of social capital (intellectual development and networked approaches to social change), one of the most important components of urban life, the university, emerged as both a creator and a reflector of such modernization.

This is the case with Birmingham and its youthful institution of higher learning, the University of Alabama at Birmingham. From its early days as a struggling offshoot of the capstone campus in Tuscaloosa, UAB’s journey to its current status as a major university has been a bumpy but interesting one. Tennant McWilliams, a longtime UAB history professor, explores the whole range of historical considerations, including UAB’s similarities and connections to trans-Atlantic civic universities; the irony of the shift from Big Steel to Big Medicine in Birmingham; the visionary administrations of Joseph F. Volker and others; and the evolving decision to make non-medical life at UAB less of a commuter experience and more of a traditional campus experience. 

McWilliams does not palliate the missteps and disputes that have, from time to time, impeded the institution’s progress. But he explains why, despite various hurdles and distractions, UAB has risen to be Alabama’s largest employer and can rightly boast that its complex of health care services, especially organ transplantation and neuroscience, as well as such fields as philosophy and psychology, are among the best in the nation.
 

About this title

About the Author

Tennant S. McWilliams is Professor of History and Dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at UAB, a native Alabamian, and author of The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and the Southern Sense of Self, 1877? and Hannis Taylor: The New Southerner as American.

Review

"Tennant McWilliams has written a superb account of UAB's history.... The research is prodigious, the interpretations sustainable. This book makes a substantial contribution to the literature of higher education and a huge contribution to the history of The University of Alabama, indeed the history of this state and of its 'Magic City.'" - E. Culpepper Clark, author of The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at The University of Alabama "Just magnificentl... I am impressed with the accuracy and the detail and the historical sweep of the project, especially the early references to the cities of Europe. This is a monumental piece of scholarly work that deserves wide readership." - Clifton K. Meador, M.D., School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University"

About this edition

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0817315462
• ISBN 13: 9780817315467
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 568