These words were written by an Aberdonian, and perhaps one detects in them the hard edge of rivalry between the two east-coast cities. Yet their author's overall judgement of Dundee as a place, and as an urban landscape, was equally severe: ‘Dundee remains unspeakably ugly.’ Similar judgements of the city have dogged it throughout its modern history, and continue to do so today. Dundee, Scotland's Murmansk, the ghastliest place on earth, reminiscent of parts of Gdansk or Grozny, with its sour-faced and miserable inhabitants, has had a bad press. Even Dundonians are not exempt from taking a perverse pleasure in the ‘grim’ story of their city and its inhabitants. An example of this appeared in Scotland on Sunday towards the end of 1999, when a series of Police Court photographs of persistent drunkards from the turn of the twentieth century was used to reinforce the popular image of Dundee as Scotland's centre of hard drinking amongst a nation of hard drinkers. Well-worn shibboleths were churned out, regardless of chronology and without qualification, leaving readers in no doubt that nineteenthcentury Dundee was truly a wretched, drink-drenched place. The pictures represented, however, the few, not the many. They were of recidivists, of individuals similar to Anne Monroe, who early in 1867 found herself in the Police Court charged with disorderly conduct; it was the ninety-first time she had been convicted.

There is much in the historical literature about the appalling living conditions of Dundee's working-class folk in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, one eminent historian has referred to Dundee as a ‘notorious black spot’ where conditions were among the worst in Britain. However, less has been written about the enterprising middle-class social reforming elite in Dundee who sparked a number of exciting innovations and placed their city at the forefront of social reform developments in Scotland. It was owing to their efforts that Dundee had, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the most advanced programme of maternal and child welfare in Scotland. Given the ‘gender apartheid’ of early twentieth-century Scotland, it is quite remarkable that the driving force behind Dundee's reforming initiative was a woman. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mary Lily Walker (1863–1913) was Dundee's leading social welfare activist, breaking into the public sphere in both the voluntary and the statutory arenas. As the warden of Grey Lodge settlement house and the honorary superintendent of the Dundee Social Union (DSU), she introduced a number of social services for Dundee's working-class women and children; and as a member of Dundee Parish Council, the Distress Committee and the Insurance Committee, she worked hard to implement new social welfare legislation. In Dundee, social reformers with a highly developed sense of civic responsibility sought new ways to combat the debilitating effects of industrial life. And in Dundee, more than in any other Scottish city, a woman operated in positions of civic authority, and moved freely in the highest levels of the town's social reforming circles.

The infirmaries were the largest and most successful of the many charitable organisations and bodies in nineteenth-century Scotland. Their immediate object was simple: to provide medical services to a working class increasingly menaced by the prospect of industrial injury in the industries on which contemporary middle-class fortunes were built. For the middle classes who provided the money and organisational skills which underpinned their foundation and survival, they offered different rewards – confirmation of their benevolent stewardship of the ‘common good’ and, more subtly but no less importantly, a powerful means of reinforcing ‘respectable’ values and behaviour amongst the working classes.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the role of the infirmary in Scottish towns had changed, or at least the distribution of influence which governed its operations had. Put simply, the working classes were no longer the passive recipients of middle-class help, but had come to assume much greater control over the place of the institution in their lives. Founded on middle-class wealth, concerns and hopes, by 1900 the infirmary was only continuing to flourish because of the capacity and desire of the working classes to use the institution's services to help themselves. It was a shift which was symptomatic of wider changes in the nature of society and of relations between the classes.

The origins of Dundee's Infirmary, which was founded in 1798, lie in existing sources of charitable care for the sick in the town in the later eighteenth century. A Dispensary had been established in 1782 and a Society for the Relief of the Indigent Sick was founded in 1797.

For over fifty years the central belt of Scotland has been a major recipient of multinational investment, but, in spite of this, the history of foreign direct investment remains unwritten. This silence has created a lacuna in our understanding of the development of the Scottish economy since 1945, as, for much of the post-war period, first American – and then Japanese – companies were regarded as vital not just to employment creation, but also to the modernisation of the Scottish manufacturing base. The first significant series of American arrivals occurred between 1945 and 1955 with consolidation to 1965; a second wave of American inward investment, based on microelectronics, was largely complete by 1973. However, through to the late 1980s the American presence suffered major closures, especially in engineering. From the early 1980s Japanese consumer and microelectronics firms have established assembly operations, with the 1990s witnessing the troubled beginnings of aggressively globalising businesses from other Pacific-rim nations. Throughout all these shifts in the demography of multinational inward investment, American firms have remained dominant in terms of employment, constituting a continuing and important element of the Scottish manufacturing base. And yet there are few fine-grained studies that focus on the experiences of particular firms or factories, and still fewer that draw on employers’ association or union archives or interview material. By drawing on such material we can examine the grassroots struggles to maintain the integrity of the ‘American model’, on the one hand, and to develop effective trade union representation inside the factory.

The emergence of a politicised, modernist, European art cinema and film culture during the 1960s and 1970s was directly influenced by the French structuralist and post-structuralist tradition. However, the anti-illusionist aesthetic which emerged from journals such as Cinétique was also influenced by Soviet montage cinema and film theory. As already mentioned, during the 1950s and 1960s, translations of essays published in Lef and Novy-Lef became more widely available in western Europe, and the demands for the creation of a revolutionary film language within these journals later went on to influence the growth of an anti-illusionist film aesthetic in France, Germany and other European countries. Many of the most important Russian formalist theoretical principles, including Shklovsky's conception of ostranenie, proved congruous with later Althusserian demands for the materialist demarcation and disclosure of dominant ideological forms, whilst the montage cinema of Eisenstein, Vertov and Medvedkin also furnished a historical canon upon which the anti-realist cinema of the 1960s and 1970s was able to build.

Formalist concepts such as ostranenie, and Eichenbaum's concept of ‘inner speech', also had an impact on another important influence on the development of cinematic political modernism: that of Brecht. Brecht's theory of the Verfremdungseffekt was directly influenced by the concept of ostranenie, and by films such as Stachka (Strike, Eisenstein, 1925), Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925) and Oktyabr (October, Eisenstein, 1928).1 As with the Soviet writings of the 1920s, translations of Brecht first appeared in French and English during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and also went on to exercise a considerable influence over European film-makers and film theorists.

As long as Gaelic sermons are preached in Highland parishes the Highlanders will have good reason to say that they are a peculiar people.

This chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part comprises a theological and cultural analysis of the Highland evangelical movement. Evangelical Christianity and its social effects lie at the heart of this book and, therefore, an examination of the nature of Highland evangelical belief and culture is of paramount importance to the whole study. The second main division of the chapter enquires into the development of Highland ‘peoplehood’ and the cultural awakening of pro-Gaelic sentiment. The social and economic aspects of these processes are examined and there are case studies of the contribution of two prominent Highlanders, the journalist John Murdoch and the leading Free Church minister, John Kennedy.

Evangelicalism in the Highlands 1843–88

Calvinist, covenant theology, ‘linking land and people in a powerful grip’ is one of the factors that maintained the long-term hegemony of presbyterianism in the modern Scottish Gaidhealtachd. Highland presbyterianism was rooted in the Genevan Reformed tradition and refined by the growth of the British Puritan movement in the seventeenth century. This calvinism was distinctly evangelical in ethos. Ansdell holds that the beliefs and spirituality of a characteristically Highland presbyterianism in the nineteenth century were given ‘form and substance by the Westminster Standards and emotional intensity by the Evangelical impulse’. Much of this ‘impulse’ was initially imparted from the south, where the influence of the great evangelical revival was dominant until the 1850s. But, as we shall come to notice, the success and longevity of this gospel religion was greatly facilitated by the cultural environment which evangelicalism shaped for itself in the Gaidhealtachd.

Viewed from within the tradition, one of the most striking characteristics of Gaelic poetry in the twentieth century is that it is a poetry of innovation. We have seen before that there were phases of innovation in earlier centuries, whether these affected style or subject-matter, or both, and that there were clear instances of individuals, whose innovatory skills can be seen to be at the “cutting-edge” of the tradition: those poets who belong to the tradition in one or many ways, but who are prepared or compelled to drive new shafts into the darkness ahead. It is doubtful, however, if innovation has ever featured so largely and persistently in the Gaelic verse tradition of a period as in the present century. It has been a matter of controversy affecting readers as well as writers, and it can be said without exaggeration that virtually whole generations of writers have thrown in their lot with the innovatory styles. The older styles have survived to a muted extent, especially among older writers, but one would feel a sense of great surprise if a new writer were to appear on the scene now, using older styles. So drastic a change calls for some comment.

A difficulty which exists in discussing these matters objectively has to be admitted, particularly by one who has been deeply involved in these movements for the last thirty to thirty-five years. It is not likely that anyone can attain perspective on the matter for some time yet. And there are difficulties in discussing, from within, the work of a small group of writers who mostly belong to different circles or cliques.

In 1893 a sizeable number of the most conservative Free Church members and adherents followed two ministers out of the Free Church to form a body which soon became known as the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The motivation for this action was the refusal of the Free Assembly in its jubilee year to repeal the Declaratory Act passed at the 1892 Assembly. The Act altered the terms of subscription to the Westminster Confession for office-bearers and was designed to give liberty of opinion to the many liberal voices in the Lowland Free Church calling for theological change and credal revision. But to Donald Macfarlane, formerly of Moy and now on the isle of Raasay, to Donald Macdonald of Shieldaig, Wester Ross, and to thousands of others who followed them, the Declaratory Act was a betrayal of the theological position of the Reformation. Whilst the Free Presbyterians represented only a minority of the Free Church in the north, the events of 1893 crystallised the deep division which had become more and more apparent since the 1860s between the Highland and Lowland sections of the Free Church.

Neither Macfarlane nor Macdonald left any comments on record concerning the land question although it was reported that Macfarlane criticised the Land League at the Stratherrick Communion in 1886. We do know, however, that a number of early Free Presbyterians were vocal in their advocacy of the crofters’ claims. At a meeting to rally support for the fledgling Free Presbyterian movement at Flashadder, Skye, an elder, John Macaskill, claimed, ‘for some years back, we had been fighting against aggressive land laws, but now it is Church laws we are fighting against – a much more serious cause of complaint’.

The postmodern signs yoking feminist with film theory figure in the work of several critics currently intrigued by futuristic cinema. Barbara Creed in ‘Gynesis, postmodernism and the science fiction horror film’ (Creed 1990A) argues that cinema's obsession with the theme of ‘becoming woman’ (the birthing metaphors of Psycho, Alien, The Fly and Terminator) represent the collapse of the symbolic and paternal function of individualism, authorship and other master ‘truths’ of the narratable world of pre-postmodem Anglo-American culture. In these films heroes cannot distinguish reality from fantasy (or in the ‘case’ of Psycho: phantasy) and this breakdown in the distinction between subject and object Creed, building on the work of Tania Modleski and E. Ann Kaplan, characterises as postmodern and potentially'feminist'. Such optimism draws on the fact that heroes who cannot control the borders of their own material bodies cease to retain any masculine individuality (Creed 1990A; Modleski 1986; Kaplan 1988).

The key feature of postmodem cinema, then, is this new signification of gender. The degree to which postmodern signs differ from other cinematic effects also may mark the possibility of new figurations of individual and collective histories. For example, the too readily available plot of boyhood to manhood, and its metonymic brothers - the emerging nation and the last frontier - have little place in postmodern films. The power of a national history, or a delimited, gendered life story, is denied in favour of the pleasures of parody, pastiche and the spectacular.

[Y]our petitioners, fully aware of their unfavourable position, under hostile proprietors, and their equally hostile agents, opposed by alien sheep and corn farmers – who acquired power and influence in the country as adventurers for worldly gain – and surrounded as the petitioners were, by a disheartened and poverty-stricken population, felt deep anxiety as to the effect of the Disruption amongst them; yet persuaded of the truth of the principles for which the Church contended, of the decided and deep attachment of the native and Christian population to these principles, and of the Lord's own gracious interposition on behalf of His own cause, and witness … they felt no misgivings as to the issue … and the whole population, with the exception of a very small and special minority, became adherents of the Free Church.

The Disruption of the Established Church of Scotland in 1843 and the misery which followed the widespread failure of the potato crop in the years after 1846 had the effect of bringing social and religious matters together more closely in the minds of many Christian leaders, as can be seen in the quotation above from the Free Presbytery of Dornoch's petition to the Free Church General Assembly. This chapter discusses the opinions of leading ministers in order to gain a fuller understanding of the presbyterian response to the social crisis. Particular emphasis is given to the views of two prominent Highlanders who were deeply engaged in the amelioration of destitution, Mackintosh Mackay, minister of the Free Church at Dunoon, Argyll; and the Established Church minister Norman MacLeod, of St Columba's Gaelic congregation in Glasgow.

‘I was strongly against getting the vaccine. Just because we’re a strong conservative family.’ This statement, given by thirty-oneyear- old Daryl Barker as he was battling COVID-19 in a Missouri hospital, illustrates a current American impasse. In its enthymematic simplicity, it encapsulates how personal health choices, political attitudes and traditional notions of masculinity have interlocked into a vaguely conceived but all the more viscerally felt causal cluster. Following a pattern familiar from numerous other deathbed pleas – an unsettling news genre that cropped up during the pandemic – Barker expressed a change of heart and spoke out in favour of getting vaccinated, despite the fact that he had himself dismissed similar appeals by other COVID-19 patients as nothing more than a hoax peddled by Democrats for political gain.

Accounts of such hardened ideological fronts usually begin with Donald Trump. By politicising the health crisis and staging himself as a virus-defying strongman, he set up COVID-19 as a highly partisan and gendered issue. However, a narrow focus on his personal influence runs the risk of neglecting the broader cultural context in which the conflict has been amplified and sustained. Counter to a common narrative, Trump's emergence as a conservative leader, male identification figure and poster child of pandemic denialism has not been a sui generis phenomenon but rather the continuation of historical antecedents. In many ways, Trump was merely the fuse that lit the fire on a national mentality steeped in anti-statist and individualist ideals which have been customarily framed in gendered terms.

Gaelic poetry in the eighteenth century reflects clearly the changes that had taken place, and were taking place, in society. That there is a relationship, whether of accord or of reaction or rebellion, between poetry and society, almost goes without saying, but at certain periods the correspondence between changes in society and in poetry strikes us forcibly, and seldom more so than in the present instance. The poetry is in part marked also by that characteristic which we have seen was a strong one in Gaelic— literary conservatism—so that we find the firm evidence of tradition in the work of even the most innovatory poets, and on the other hand find the old ways followed by conservative poets well into the nineteenth century. These are fairly minor qualifications; the central fact is clear: Gaelic poetry breathes a new air in the eighteenth century, and shows a new vigour.

There were changes and influences of a negative kind, especially those associated with the decline in native clan leadership. The notion, and ideal, of patriarchal leader, accompanied by a traditional panoply, had been in decline for some three centuries, and had indeed gone far enough to justify some attempts at artificial revival in the mid-eighteenth century and after. Sir James MacDonald of Sleat made John MacCodrum his bard, in a vain romantic attempt to call back an age that had gone. The patron-employer belonged firmly to the past, and his disappearance made certain types of verse superfluous. He was succeeded, it is true, by what we might term the patron-ideal, and verses continued to be addressed to him as a figurehead, by poets whose concept of poetry required some such target.

This chapter examines the specifically Bukharan iteration of the Qarakhanid architectural style which developed in Ma Wara’l-Nahr in the twelfth century. There are five structures within the city and its environs, all of which were built relatively close together, both temporally and spatially. What follows is a comparative study of three of the buildings, all of which date from the early twelfth to the early thirteenth centuries. The structures, comprising a large mihrab and qibla wall, along with the portals of a mosque and of a mazar, all share a number of decorative and formal elements, thus demonstrating the problems inherent in focusing on any one particular structural or functional typology.

The first building to be studied is the Qarakhanid-era portion of the qibla wall of the Namazgah. It is located to the south of the old city of Bukhara, on the site of an earlier Qarakhanid royal palace and garden. The qibla wall has been extended, and a large open domed structure was added to the east in the sixteenth century. The original section appears to have been built in 1119–20, and there have been extensive losses to the lower portion of the mihrab and the surrounding decoration, as well as the south section of the qibla wall. Nevertheless, the surviving areas act as a pattern book for the decorative vocabulary employed in terracotta on buildings erected under Qarakhanid patronage across a large portion of Central Asia6 in the period spanning from the eleventh to the early thirteenth centuries.

Sometime around 1920 Picasso famously declared ‘I’ve discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I’ve nothing else to learn’. By contrast, the domestic photographs of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell teach us a great deal about gender and modernism (Baldassari 1997, p. 17). Photography is a tool which Woolf and Bell used, not simply as a documentary device but as a means of crossing the border between the visual and the unconscious. Yet one of the interesting things about domestic photography and the related art of cinema journalism is that these are very marginalised theoretically within criticism about modernism. This is despite the fact that most modernist women writers and artists, like most middle-class women in the 1920s and 1930s, owned ‘vest-pocket Kodaks’ and developed photographs throughout their careers as well as writing about other visual representations such as cinema. Domestic photography must have had a profound, if not necessarily acknowledged, influence on modernist women's thoughts about life, art and writing.

Yet from Adorno and Horkheimer on, criticism of modernism relies heavily on the avant-garde ‘story’: a disdain of popular culture as well as a disdain of the new consumers of popular culture (predominantly female) (Adorno and Horkheimer 1973). This has been at the expense of a more adequate consideration of the potential of the ‘domestic’ arts to imagine new visual possibilities for women in the context of individual and familial formations. In my research on Woolf's and Bell's photo albums, I found that (although different in type) they amounted to a contrary cultural formation, in which particular representations of family and friends were a source of psychic and aesthetic imaginaries. The technologies of modernity – photography and cinema – were then an incentive to, and a medium for, border crossings in this special sense.