The general election of November 1922 is considered the breakthrough for the Labour Party in Scotland. In capturing almost a third of the Scottish vote, Labour bettered the performance of the party south of the border, setting a pattern that would prevail until 1935. Labour had the wide support of the Scottish trade union movement, but its political success was largely due to the intense local activism of the members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and the financial backing that the ILP provided. Indeed, for many Scots the ILP was the Labour Party. Glasgow and west Scotland accounted for around half of the twenty-nine seats the party won in 1922, and Labour made a clean sweep of all eleven coalfield constituencies. But there were equally impressive socialist successes elsewhere. In Dundee, Labour's E.D. Morel, and Scottish Prohibitionist leader Edwin Scrymgeour beat the National Liberals Winston Churchill and D.J. MacDonald, and as almost half of the Dundee electorate voted Labour, Prohibitionist or Communist the city could legitimately regard itself as more red than Clydeside. For almost a decade thereafter Labour advanced significantly on all fronts in Scotland until the collapse of the second Labour government in 1931 left the party with only seven seats. At Dundee Labour lost the seat it first won in 1906 and Scrymgeour lost the seat he had held since 1922. Labour recovered to win twenty Scottish seats in 1935 (although Dundee was not among them) and in local elections captured Glasgow Council in 1933 and Dundee Council in 1936, paving the way for its long period of dominance in Scottish politics after the Second World War.

‘If a pregnant woman tested positive for the AIDS virus, would you recommend an abortion?’ one reporter asked Surgeon General Charles Everett Koop as he stood among a crowd of journalists and twentytwo television cameras at the National Press Club on 24 March 1987. All of those present anticipated that the surgeon general's words – the answer from a self-proclaimed evangelical Christian, nominated by the avowed anti-abortion President Ronald Reagan – would be headlined on the evening news and next day's papers. ‘If you wanted to give her all the possibilities that were available to her, you would have to mention abortion,’ Koop replied. While Koop later reassured reporters that his personal opposition to abortion had not changed, his conservative advocates viewed his pronouncement as an evidence of his ‘re-thinking’ on the subject. Although Koop's commitment to public health compelled him to confirm that abortion was legal and possible in 1987, he was never motivated by a duty to affirm women's reproductive rights. Instead, like many other government officials, he wanted to protect children from HIV.

‘One of the things I think is most important about this,’ he continued, ‘is my great concern for the babies who are born to positive mothers. I think no woman should contemplate a pregnancy without voluntarily wanting to be tested for the AIDS virus.’ In September 1982, after receiving reports of immunodeficiency disorders in young, White men, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defined a new disease, AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), as the presence of Kaposi sarcoma, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, and a series of other opportunistic infections that suggested the failure of an otherwise healthy person's immune system.

In popular perception, Dundee is far more likely to be associated with jute, jam and journalism than with the graciousness of early nineteenthcentury neo-classical town planning. It never built a new town, and the myth grew that it had never been the kind of town that aspired to civic embellishment of that kind, and could not have afforded it anyway. Indeed, end of the nineteenth century Dundee, rather than being associated with good planning, had become a byword for bad: ‘A town with the finest site in Scotland spoiled by the absence of a plan’, as Sir Patrick Geddes put it. Indeed, it was the condition of jute Dundee, that impenetrable swathe of mixed industry and housing that encircled the old seaport, that turned the mind of the young professor of botany in Dundee to town planning and the founding of that discipline.2 By examining the condition of pre-jute Dundee, this paper will demonstrate how Dundee could well have afforded to build a new town but – alone of all substantial communities in Scotland – deliberately chose not to, and why that might have occurred.

There were several reasons why a Scottish Town Council might decide to embark on constructing a new town in the principal ‘improvement’ period between 1770 and 1830 – not least that everybody else was doing it. The physical state of the centres of most Scots medieval towns had been deteriorating during the eighteenth century, leading to a fear of infectious disease accompanied, perhaps, by a growing preference for social segregation

The chapter analyses a 1967 immunisation campaign led by Dr Robert Hingson and the non-governmental organisation (NGO) he founded, Brother's Brother Foundation, that was aided by key logistical support from the US government. This collaborative effort to promote public health and eradicate disease reveals one of the diverse ways the US government improved public health and fought disease in the American Century. This programme achieved a degree of ‘soft power’ for the United States, and it intersects with broader narratives about the role of the United States, American NGOs and US citizens in advancing international health. Examining the episode illuminates American approaches to development in the 1960s, and it highlights an understudied bilateral relationship – that between the United States and Costa Rica, or the hawk and the sparrow, as one author has termed it. Finally, the campaign offers us a means of analysing public–private global health collaboration in foreign countries.

Before the Brother's Brother Foundation campaign in Costa Rica, the United States had a record of cooperating with Latin American governments, at least since the 1940s, on sanitation, medical care and public health. These efforts could also be framed in terms of the potential positive economic benefits – enhanced productivity, increased life expectancy and greater development. In the view of Representative Hugh L. Carey (Democrat, NY), we should see these health interventions as ‘effective instrument[s] of foreign policy’. He wrote, ‘Historically, American medical help has been used to open new frontiers in our hemisphere and around the world.’

In 1896 Sir John Leng, Dundee's Liberal Member of Parliament, made a visit to India and described Calcutta as ‘the Indian Dundee’. In a series of detailed letters he set out the ‘resemblances and contrasts’ between the two cities. It was jute that had brought these Scottish and Bengali urban centres together, and the Dundee and Calcutta jute mills were the prime focus of Leng's comparative commentary. No other two world cities were linked in such an intimate yet competitive embrace. Dundee's expertise in jute spinning and weaving had helped start the Calcutta industry in the 1850s and continued to shape it throughout the next one hundred years. But by 1900 the Calcutta industry dwarfed its Dundee counterpart. In 1911, the peak year for employment in the Dundee jute mills, the total labour force reached 37,000 workers. When Calcutta achieved its peak in 1928 there were 339,000 workers, almost twice as numerous as the entire population of Dundee. In 1919 Ernest Cox, owner of the Cox mills in Lochee, and the first chairman of the Dundee Association of Jute Spinners and Manufacturers, warned of ‘the probability of the home market being swamped by cheap Calcutta made goods’. During a parliamentary debate on the jute industry in 1936, Florence Horsbrugh, the Conservative MP for Dundee at the time, spoke in apocalyptic terms of ‘a new terror’ for Dundee workers as imports from India surged 125 per cent higher than they had been in 1935. ‘If something is not done, and done quickly,’ she starkly warned, ‘the jute trade of the United Kingdom will cease to exist.’ By the middle of the twentieth century Dundee's offspring on the banks of the Hooghly seemed about to devour its parent on the banks of the Tay.

The origins of this book lie in the History of Dundee project that I initiated in 1997, in what was then the University of Dundee's Department of History. Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities (Tuckwell Press, 2000) was the first substantial publication generated by the project. Since Victorian Dundee, research teams working under the auspices of the History of Dundee project have managed to produce another two books on Dundee's history. The first was Dundee: Renaissance to Enlightenment (2009), which I edited along with Professors Charles McKean and Bob Harris. The second, published early in 2011, was Jute No More: Transforming Dundee, a project led by Professor Jim Tomlinson. Although these two books followed the Victorian Dundee model in that they are collections of essays written by topic experts, their format was different. Available in hardback, they are more lavishly illustrated, and have been published by Dundee University Press Ltd. One reason therefore for publishing a second edition of Victorian Dundee is to make available to readers a book that complements the other two, and completes what is now a series of three that cover Dundee's history from the sixteenth century to the present.

But whatever the realities of life in Victorian Dundee, these, as with everything in the past, remain unaltered, as fixed in 2011 as they were in 2000 and back to the Victorian period itself. But if the past remains the same, history and historians move on. What they find interesting changes, in accordance with their own enthusiasms.

The early twentieth century saw a burgeoning confidence, amongst some at least, that, through the influence of town planning, the ugly, disordered and unhealthy city of the nineteenth century could be banished for ever. Through their transformed urban fabric, the new cities would reflect a confidence in progress and new technologies, and in the progressiveness of their government. The disharmony and squalor which had disfigured the city in the previous century were to be removed; or rather, out of the disorder and misery of the nineteenth-century industrial city was to emerge a different, revitalised city – efficient, healthy, socially cohesive, and beautiful – in short, the ‘city of the future’.

This chapter explores Dundee's participation in the early town-planning movement and the ways in which, under its influence, several individuals began, from the turn of the twentieth century, to imagine a new and radically different future for Dundee. A key figure in the story which will unfold is James Thomson. Born in Edinburgh in 1852, and after having served an apprenticeship to one of the capital's civil engineering firms, Thomson arrived in the town in 1873 to join the staff of William Mackison, who was from 1868 the town's burgh engineer.

The nineteenth century is above all others the century of the Gaelic diaspora. It was chiefly in this period that people of Gaelic descent and language became distributed throughout the Scottish population, but especially the population of the Lowland industrial belt, and also went further afield, in particular to the Americas, where in company with Lowland Scots they proved to be hardy and capable settlers. The language and music and life-style they took with them survived for varying periods and with varying intensity where they went, or influenced the texture of the life around them, and that influence can still be traced from Milngavie to Milwaukee. There is room for a serious historical study of this diaspora.

This dispersal of the Gaelic people had begun, in a significant way, in the second half of the eighteenth century. The magnets were those that were to work so effectively in the nineteenth century— the industrial Lowlands and the undeveloped spaces of the New World—but these magnets were to grow enormously in strength and attraction. The movement had indeed begun earlier. We may note, for example, the settlement of a group of 350 people from Argyllshire in North Carolina in 1739, and subsequent grants of land to persons with Highland names in 1740 and spasmodically for several years thereafter. A large number of pardoned Jacobite “rebels”, to use the official description, had been transported to America as “indentured servants”, which is sometimes a polite circumlocution for “slaves”, and this movement had begun before the ‘45 Rising.

Eisenstein's initial theory of montage was premised on the belief that a film's structure should be built up through the juxtaposition of contrasting elements. Eisenstein believed that this form of ‘collision’ montage would generate more powerful filmic effects, and, consequently, would also have a more forceful impact upon the audience. Eisenstein had studied mechanical engineering at the Petrograd Institute of Engineering before he became involved in first theatre and then the cinema, and he derived his initial conception of montage from this background, as well as from the constructivist emphasis on mechanistic assemblage. In Film Form, for example, he reveals the influence of both engineering and constructivism on him when he describes montage as a word ‘borrowed from industry, a word denoting the assembly of machinery, pipes, machine tools. This striking word is “montage”, which means assembling'. Eisenstein's early training in engineering also led him to seek a unit of measurement for calibrating the influence of his films, and this became the ‘attraction': the basic element of measure around which Eisenstein would assemble his montage chains.

To this concern with mechanistic assemblage, Eisenstein also added an insistence that each attraction within the assemblage should retain a degree of autonomy, rather than be completely subsumed within the work as a whole. Thus, set design, costumery, lighting, plot, and other aspects of the film should retain a ‘democratic harmony', rather than be ordered into a ‘feudal hierarchy'. This anti-realist aspect of Eisenstein's ideas was initially influenced by a context of avant-gardist criticism of the established Russian theatre. Newly formed avant-garde groups such as Vsevolod Meyerhold's R.S.F.S.R Theatre No. i, Vladimir Mayakovsky's futurist theatre troupe, and the Proletkult theatre, all shared an antipathy towards the ‘bourgeois’ theatre practised by established institutions such as the Bolshoi, and argued instead for the establishment of a nonnaturalistic, modernist form of theatre.

In the midst of the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Baltimore Afro- American detailed the costs of ‘one of the most pitiable cases’ of racism that had occurred in the crisis. The paper described struggling to find space in one of the city's overcrowded Black hospitals for an ‘unknown man who was found unconscious’ and sought a volunteer to take charge of his care. ‘This,’ the paper concluded, ‘is one of the extremely sad cases that are the pitiable result of the jim crow [sic] policy practiced in White hospitals of the city.’

Fast forward to March 2020, when Gary Fowler, a Black man living in Detroit, began feeling short of breath. With his own father suffering from COVID-19, Fowler understood that he, too, might be infected and visited three emergency rooms, pleading for a coronavirus test and help with his worsening symptoms. He was repeatedly turned away, told he was probably just suffering from bronchitis, could get better help elsewhere, or should ‘go home’ and ‘drink water’. As it became more difficult to breathe, Fowler began sleeping in a recliner. Sometime during the night of 6 April he wrote, ‘heart beat irregular’ and ‘oxygen level low’. The next morning his wife found him dead. Fowler was only fifty-six years old.

The United States in which Fowler died was vastly different from that which suffered through the 1918 influenza pandemic. Advancements in science, medicine and public health offered new tools for combatting COVID-19 and had confirmed the efficacy of basic public health measures, providing distinct advantages to Americans in 2020.

GLOSSARY

abdāl, one of the degrees in the Sufi hierarchical order of saints who, unknown by the masses, participate by means of their powerful infl uence in the preservation of the order of the universe. According to the most generally accept ed opinion, the abdāl hold the fifth place in the ten-place hierarchy of the saints. Goldziher 1960.

adab, manners; etiquette; culture; refi nement; cultivation; the sum of the literary and general knowledge which makes a person courteous and “urbane”; profane culture (as opposed to religious knowledge, ʿilm, q.v.).

abjad, the fi rst of the eight mnemotechnical terms into which the twenty-eight consonants of the Arabic alphabet were divided. The order of the fi rst six terms corresponds to the order of the “Phoenician” alphabet and reveals the origin of the series. The tradition given in FB – that they derive from the names of the days of the week – is one of several origin legends. Weil 1979.

ʿajam, non-Arab, especially Persian (lands). Bosworth 1984.

akhbār, sing. khabar, discrete reports varying in length from a line to several pages.

ʿālim, see ʿulamāʾ (ulama).

amālī, lit. dictations; a record of a set of scholarly information dictated orally by a senior shaykh to a junior scholar acting as kātib (q.v.) or mustamlī (q.v.). The record of the dictations serves as an aid to memorization and may subsequently be read out during the senior shaykh's lectures, not infrequently repeated by the mustamlī to ensure the audibility of the content. The mustamlī, also called muʿīd, is the “repetitor.” Amālī works were circulated amongst scholars. Sezgin 1967, I: 32.