This volume offers a complex and multifaceted image of US public health and how the challenge to improve people's welfare became interwoven with the building of modern America. The development of the public health system in the United States has overlapped with many crucial changes in the country's governance that have taken place since the early twentieth century. The expansion of citizenship and civil rights, the tremendous growth in economic productivity, and the emergence of an overpowering and all-encompassing concept of national security, among others, have profoundly modified the federal state's functions, operations and power projection. At the same time, the implementation of specific public health policies and reforms – regarding immunisation, sanitation and occupational safety, for example – has been at the core of the self-assigned, global mission that the country pursued during the American Century, and the liberal order Washington built around it.

The contrast between these ambitions and the actual practices of American public health has been – and to a large extent still is – one of the most significant tests to American conceptions of democracy. As the authors of the chapters presented in this volume recognise, the story of the public health system in America is one of expansion and progressive reform, as well as long-standing constraints and discriminations linked to cultural, economic, social and political determinants.

To better identify and explain such tensions, the contributors of this volume focus mainly on two inter-related issues. On the one hand, they explored the dynamic relationship between public health and the American state, looking at how the country's public institutions have coped with the growing need for care of people in the United States and, given Washington's increasingly global outreach, also abroad.

There are clear signs of continuity from the surviving Samanid structures in a number of the subsequent Qarakhanid buildings. Two tombs, one in Bukhara and one in Tim, are examined here, alongside the archaeological remains of the Samanid palace in the citadel of Afrasiyab and other structures in Nishapur, with a view to establishing which elements remained in use in the following centuries. Numerous other earlier regional monuments are addressed throughout the book in reference to specific structures, and some of these are also briefly introduced here.

The sources of the limited corpus of Samanid monuments can be found, in part, in the pre-Islamic architecture of the Soghdians and have been examined in detail by Pugachenkova.1 This is particularly clear when the Samanid tomb in Bukhara is compared with the image of a structure in the Soghdian wall paintings uncovered in Penjikent and dated to the fifth–seventh centuries. Whilst it is to be expected that buildings in any one region are likely to have drawn on at least some elements of the pre-existing local architectural style, the extremely limited evidence for either Soghdian or Samanid architecture makes observations that go beyond the most general hard to support with reliable evidence. The following discussion is not an attempt to study the earlier monuments in close detail, as such a task falls outside the scope of this work. Instead, the intention is to provide a sense of the existing architectural milieu from which the Qarakhanid monuments emerged.

Greatly aided by the influx of multinational companies after 1945, recorded unemployment in Dundee was below the Scottish average in the 1950s and 1960s, and at below 3 per cent the figure emphasises how far the city had economically improved from the dark days of the 1930s. While net emigration increased, the total population of the city rose between 1951 and 1961 and was then stable until 1971. These employment and population trends suggest that the city was participating substantially in the post-war ‘golden age’ of the British economy. This relative buoyancy was despite the troubles of jute; after the stability of much of the 1950s and early 1960s, the industry again came under pressure in the late 1960s, as polypropylene challenged jute in many uses. The radical rebuilding of the city centre in the 1960s was linked to an optimistic frame of mind, which saw the city as having started on a path of successful modernisation, and it was widely believed that the rebuilding would entrench and reinforce this process. As Jim Phillips emphasises in ‘The “Retreat” to Scotland: The Tay Road Bridge and Dundee's post- 1945 Development’, Chapter 10 above, the optimism surrounding the opening of the Tay Bridge in 1966 was emblematic of this perception that, underpinned by new communications, the city was set fair to flourish. Some allowance must be made for official boosterism on such occasions, but this optimistic tone is also evident elsewhere. Thus Carstairs, an academic commentator, in his contribution to the 1968 British Association volume on the city, endorsed the view that the local economy had proved ‘resilient, flexible, capable and willing to expand’.

‘We have gone to the rescue frequently in the case of floods and other visitations which were local … but I think in this case the work is national and affects the welfare of the war work as well as the welfare of the part of the country where the scourge is raging most severely.’ This statement from Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts came in September 1918 as Congress discussed the rapidly spreading Spanish influenza epidemic. The epidemic presented a crisis for the United States. Beyond its effects on the lives of millions of Americans, the virus threatened the federal government's power. Because the epidemic's effects were too expansive for the existing public health structure to handle, the epidemic had the potential to severely disrupt the war effort in Europe and hamper the ability of industry to supply needed war materials. Not only was influenza devastating to human life, but also its enhanced destructive power during wartime was alarming to Cabot Lodge and other elected officials.

As Congress surveyed the US response to Spanish influenza in late September, it recognised how quickly the epidemic had overwhelmed the ability of state and local governments to cope. Tens of thousands of cases were reported in major cities, but while local authorities closed schools, businesses and attempted other methods of slowing the spread of the disease, nothing worked. The number of those sick, hospitalised and dying spiralled upward. State and local government health boards were similarly helpless in their efforts to stop the epidemic or to treat those already sick, and even when they pooled their resources, the government entities were unable to combat an epidemic of the magnitude of Spanish influenza.

Whilst they form part of a wider regional trend, a number of distinctively Qarakhanid minarets survive across the region. This chronological study looks at the corpus in its entirety and demonstrates the connections between them, as well as links to the decoration of other contemporaneous structural typologies. Minarets in Samarkand, Balasagun, Uzgend, Termez, Bukhara and Vabkent are examined in order to demonstrate the different variants as well as unifying elements within the extant corpus.

A wide array of forms were employed for minaret construction and decoration across the wider region, including areas in which control overlapped or changed hands between different dynasties throughout the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. There are discernible links between some of the formal and decorative elements of Qarakhanid minarets and those of the Seljuqs to the west, as well as the Ghurids and Ghaznavids to the south. However, despite the broad similarities with minarets erected under Seljuq, Ghurid and Ghaznavid patronage, the minarets within the Qarakhanid corpus can be viewed as representatives of a unique and distinctive regional style.

Perhaps the single most striking architectural form developed in the lands under Qarakhanid control is the battered shaft minaret, often with a distinctive lantern structure covering the balcony. Numerous examples survive, in varying degrees of preservation and originality. Apart from a couple of structures built in the far off Rum Seljuq empire in Anatolia, this form is unique to the region and does not appear to have been adopted into the wider corpus Seljuq, Ghaznavid or Ghurid minarets in Iran and Afghanistan. The closest comparable structures are to be found in Dehistan, which is relatively close to the lands under the Qarakhanids, but located to the south of the Oxus River, which marked the southern boundary of their territory. Two damaged minarets survive in Dehistan.

INTRODUCTION

‘Modernity realized itself in and through the cinema’ (Hansen 1995, p. 363). As Miriam Hansen argues, the industrialisation of art, most notably the invention of cinema, is a quintessential modern development. Equally, the main features of modernity, its mass urban subjectivities and new modes of perception, mark modernism's artistic strategies and new technologies of perception and representation. In Modern Life and Modern Subjects, Lisa Tickner suggests that modernism in the arts was very heterogeneous in its response to modernity, embracing artists such as the Futurists who engaged ‘with urban subject matter’ and others, including Kandinsky and Vanessa Bell, ‘who appeared, at least indifferent’ (Tickner 2000, p. 184). But the modernisation of art, such as the development of avant-garde international audiences, did create distinctive communities of artists, film-makers and critics.

The pivotal decades of twentieth-century modernist art, from Roger Fry's 1910 Post-Impressionist Exhibition to the end of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s, are also the decades of the founding of the influential London Film Society, the major avant-garde film journal Close Up, and the flourishing European cinema of Sergei Eisenstein, G. W. Pabst and Carl Dreyer. Just as the invention of cinema is part of other technological and cultural changes that characterise modernity, so too cinema encouraged changes in modernist aesthetics (Friedberg 1993, p. 163). Although early, like later, cinema could be often drama-led, shaped by literary narratives and mimetic conventions, such as The Pickwick Papers (1913), modernism's fluid points of view and decentring of subjectivities match cinema's more innovative disruption of chronology and fascination with new subjectivities (Rado 1994).

On the evening of 19 April 1872, a meeting of local maidservants was held in Mathers’ Hotel, Dundee. Informal and animated, it was addressed by two girls arguing for changes in the working conditions of domestic servants, and concluded with the formation of the Dundee and District Domestic Servants’ Association (DDDSA).

The meeting was the culmination of a lively exchange of letters concerning the rights and wrongs of domestic service that, since January, had been filling the columns of a local newspaper. The correspondence had developed after two maids wrote to the newspaper expressing the desire to see their hours of labour reduced from over 100 a week, and for a holiday once a month. In reply, ‘A Mistress’ accused them of laziness, arrogance and presumptuousness, advising them to ‘have a little more regard for the truth’ and ‘not to forget that we are their superiors’. Such a peremptory response provoked a flood of letters from indignant maidservants, and by April the maids had decided to hold a mass meeting to discuss their grievances. These included their long hours of labour, irregular and little leisure time, the wearing of a uniform that they found degrading, and the degree of control that a mistress had over her servant's career. By the first week of June, the maidservants had held three further meetings and clarified the aims of the DDDSA. They claimed that over 200 local maids wished to join the union: this represented around 10 per cent of Dundee's resident maidservant population. They also won the support of the Dundee United Trades’ Council.

On 18 May 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his administration's decision to support the international effort to eradicate smallpox, signalling a shift in the US approach to smallpox and international health. In his announcement, Johnson warned that ‘for as long smallpox exists anywhere in the world, no country is safe from it. This dread disease spreads so rapidly, that even a single case creates the threat of epidemic.’ Although smallpox had effectively disappeared from the United States by the beginning of the twentieth century, outbreaks due to importations were possible (as demonstrated in a 1947 outbreak in New York that left five people dead), and the ‘dread disease’ continued to maim and kill elsewhere in the world, with more than 50,000 cases and 9,000 deaths reported in 1965. Against such a fearsome killer in a global disease environment, the United States shared the fate of the rest of the world, said Johnson: ‘It is clear that every nation of the world, whether or not it has experienced smallpox in recent years, has a major stake in a worldwide eradication program.’ Americans would proudly join their fellow world citizens against a common enemy, with Johnson promising that, ‘this Government is ready to work with other interested countries to see to it that smallpox is a thing of the past by 1975’.

Johnson's announcement came as part of a flurry of American anti-smallpox initiatives during 1965. Marking World Health Day in March, Johnson noted the continued danger of smallpox and anticipated that the disease ‘will one day be only a memory and that ours will be a healthier and happier world’.

The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision provided federal approval of de jure and de facto segregation on American soil. The decision provided the imprimatur of government-sanctioned Black inferiority in every realm of public life and interaction. The relegation of Black people to the status of second-class citizenship, including in the realm of public health, had lasting consequences in the twentieth century. American courts and laws were at the apex of shaping the meaning of democracy at the turn of the twentieth century. In so doing, courts reflected broader scientific theories that the intermingling of various groups were undemocratic and biologically unnatural. Blacks, Indigenous groups, Asians and Mexicans were considered to be incapable of both citizenship and carrying the burden of upholding democratic principles.

The Plessy decision also reflected a zeitgeist of science and politics that irreparably harmed the country's commitment to democracy by making an entire group of the population into second-class citizens. Statistician Frederick Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896) leaned on a century of racial science to suggest that Black people were inherently prone to criminality and a host of venereal and contagious diseases rooted in their supposed biological inferiority. W. E. B. Du Bois countered Hoffman's assumptions with his Health and Physique of the Negro American published one year later in 1897. Rather than biological and racial differences, Du Bois argued that systematic structural and environmental inequalities resulted in poor Black health. Acknowledging the higher Black morbidity and mortality rates for most disease categories, Du Bois made the important point that stark poverty, hunger, poor sanitation, nutritional deficiencies and inferior housing caused Black people to suffer disproportionately from tuberculosis, pneumonia, whooping cough, diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles and infant mortality.

It is striking how Hollywood cinema confines Black women to comic roles, ‘mammies', prostitutes and carers of whites at the very moment when Black women's writing is drawing vividly on Black culture. The reason why cinematic representations have not matched this progressive accomplishment is self evident. Black women are rarely the makers of movies; Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991) is the first full length mainstream film to be directed by an Afra-American. In addition, while Black women's creative writing and literary theory is now an established and popular body of work, Black women's film theory has lacked an institutional place (hooks 1992).

The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed a new phenomenon: a huge growth in Black film-making drawing on Black popular culture and Black anger at social and economic deprivations (the films of Spike Lee and John Singleton), and gay Black voices (Isaac Julien). Critical studies addressing issues of difference and Black representations are now growing in number and are having an impact on Black independent film-making if not, as yet, on Hollywood stereotypes (Gever 1993). The emergence of both Black mainstream and ‘guerrilla’ cinema (to use Spike Lee's term) together with a wide spectrum of Black feminist literature, both creative and critical, suggests a new threshold in Black aesthetics.

The films of Julie Dash join those of the British independent film makers Pratibha Parmar, Isaac Julien and others in consciously employing innovative techniques, particularly new forms of narrative.

There are significant continuities between theories of cinematic realism and practices of post-war realist cinema. Of all the major theorists considered in the previous chapter, Grierson exercised the least influence during the post-war period. The more journalistic approach to the documentary film which he adopted in the late 1930s failed to provide an adequate model for documentary realist film-making after 1945. Similarly, the ideas of Siegfried Kracauer, particularly as expressed in Theory of Film (i960), emerged against the context of a poststructuralist tradition which consigned Kracauer's model of cinematic realism to the margins of critical concern, and it was not until at least the late 1970s that Kracauer's work began to influence western European film-making or film theory to any meaningful extent. In contrast to Grierson and Kracauer, Lukâcsian and Bazinian theory exercised a greater impact on post-war cinematic realism. Lukács’ theory of critical realism was influential amongst some left-wing and communist film-makers across Europe, and, although largely ignored by the majority of film theorists in western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, became increasingly influential during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Bazin's ideas were also taken up by many French film-makers from 1945 onwards, although the extent to which they were properly understood remains open to debate.

In addition to the influence of theories of cinematic realism, postwar European realist cinema was also influenced by a range of other factors. Post-war French realistic cinema incorporated many of the stylistic traits and thematic motifs associated with both the poetic realist cinema of the 1930s, and the cinema of the occupation.