Office files of the Executive Secretary and Special Council to W. Cooper Green, president of the Birmingham city commission and mayor. The bulk of the material relates to the development and expansion of the Birmingham Municipal Airport.

Barrett, a Birmingham Physician, served one term as president of the Birmingham city commission. The scrapbooks contain newspaper clippings relating to Barrett and Birmingham city government for the period November 6, 1917 to November 7, 1921.

This collection contains the personal papers, primarily correspondence, of the Bass family of Birmingham. Most of the papers are letters to and from Mrs. Fred Bass, Sr., her son Fred Bass Jr., and her daughter Helen Bass, for whom the collection is named. The bulk of correspondence dates from the late 1930s and early 1940s the years in which Fred Bass, Jr. attended the Marion Military Institute. The letters to and from Fred Bass, Jr. capture the cares and worries of a boy in the 1930s hoping for a career in the military. There are a few mentions of the oncoming war in the correspondence including a few jokes about Hitler. The collection also contains letters to Helen from her nephew, Fred. These letters revolve around Fred being drafted into the army and sent to Vietnam. While in Vietnam, he served as a detention officer in a POW camp, and in his letters, he gives descriptions of his surroundings.

Charles Minnegrode Beckwith served as the fourth Episcopal Bishop of Alabama. He had previously been dean of St. Luke’s Cathedral in Atlanta and a missionary priest in the Diocese of Texas. Beckwith instituted Alabama’s first Episcopal college chaplaincy at Auburn University and expanded the church’s outreach to the deaf. Considered by many to be authoritarian, Beckwith often clashed with clergy and lay members of the diocese. He died in 1928. This collection contains correspondence relating to parishes in the diocese as well as some personal papers and publications.

The handwritten World War I diary of First Lt. Belden covers the period June 28, 1918 to June 25, 1919. He describes his experiences while serving in France.

The Belvedere Study Club is a women’s club established in Birmingham in 1948. Its members hold meetings to discuss literature and other topics and engage in philanthropic activities. The collection contains minutes of meetings, scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, yearbooks and correspondence.

Jack Bethea was a Birmingham novelist and editor of the Birmingham Post newspaper. Bethea was born in Birmingham in 1892. He worked as a reporter for the Birmingham Age-Herald and as city editor for the Birmingham Ledger before joining the Post when the paper was established in 1921. Bethea was the author of four novels: Bed Rock (1924), The Deep Seam (1925), Honor Bound (1926) and Silver Fleece (1927). Much of his fiction was set in the industrial communities around Birmingham. Bethea committed suicide by hanging himself in a Birmingham hotel room in 1928. This collection contains a partial typescript for Bed Rock and a more complete typescript for Deep Seam. Both typescripts show the author’s handwritten corrections.

Birmingfind was a project funded in the 1980s by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to collect historical information on Birmingham ethnic groups and neighborhoods. This collection includes oral history interviews, clippings, publications, census data and other material relating to Birmingham’s Lebanese, Greek, Italian, African American, and Jewish communities and the neighborhoods of Brookside, West End, Wylam, Woodlawn, North Birmingham and Ensley. The project also published a series of booklets on the histories of ethnic groups and neighborhoods.

Birmingfind was a project funded in the 1980s by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to collect historical information on Birmingham ethnic groups and neighborhoods. This collection contains photographs showing individuals, families, businesses, churches, school groups and other subjects from Birmingham’s Lebanese, Greek, Italian, African American, and Jewish communities and the neighborhoods of Brookside, West End, Wylam, Woodlawn, North Birmingham and Ensley.

Newspaper clippings, correspondence, publications and other material relating to various sporting events held in the Birmingham area, including professional baseball, football and hockey; college football; Olympic sports; golf; high school sports; horse racing.

The papers span the years 1913 to 1980. The bulk of the material falls between 1965-1975. The minutes, reports, and related documents and financial records form a substantive part of the collection, not only in terms of bulk, but also of information concerning the history, growth, and structure of the organization

Photographs of players and games, primarily from the Birmingham Black Barons and the Birmingham industrial leagues. Many of these images come from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Memphis-Shelby County Public Library, and permission from those institutions is required to copy or publish the images. Additional baseball photographs are available in the Archives’ collections Photographs: General Collection (AR 1556) and Lorenzo “Piper” David Photographs (AR 1700).

This collection contains three scrapbooks of newspaper clippings for the period 1925 to1958 and programs from performances from the period 1932 to 1959.

Clippings and other material documenting the history of the conservatory, now a part of the Birmingham-Southern College Department of Fine Arts.