SQL Queries

I have a table with: ID, FirstName, LastName, Specialty.... What I need is to count down how many people are with a specialty and do it in a single SQL query. I know how to do this with two, but it should be a better way. That's one problem.
The other one is the same with counting and displaying.
Table 1:
ID, Item, Division
Table 2:
ID, Call, Item.
What I need is to grab all the items belonging to one division from table 1 and count how many calls were made to 1 item. For this, I'm clueless. Something like:
Division 1
Item1 - 2 calls
Item2 - 5 calls
Item3 - 6 calls
...
Division 2
Item 1 - 4 calss
...

Thanks.