This introductory chapter discusses the debates existing within the academic community on football’s origins, class issues and the role of football within a developing city such as Manchester. Manchester provides a unique opportunity to study the development of football within a conurbation. whose rapid growth and influx of cultures, ideas and skills, including sporting interests, helped football to become woven into the cultural fabric of Greater Manchester. The successes of Manchester United and Manchester City have given global exposure to the city and associated it with footballing glory. Association football has become central to Mancunian life and the sport has established perceptions of Manchester, its image and power on a global scale. Using a longue durée framework this work analyses Manchester’s footballing activity through to 1919, by which time the city was regarded as a footballing conurbation. The themes, cycles and events highlighted provide evidence of the game’s transition within a major conurbation. The chapter also explains the research methodology employed, which has been influenced by the work of historian Fernand Braudel.

Hollywood actors and life coaches often invoke analogies about paddling ducks to illustrate the need for composure. As the saying goes, ducks glide effortlessly on top of the water while paddling furiously beneath the surface. The image of the paddling duck is useful in helping to frame the discussion of President Obama’s accomplishments in responding to African American political interests. In this chapter, seven cases are examined to see if there is any evidence that the Obama Administration was paddling beneath the surface. Here evidence is found that President Obama made an effort to address issues of concern to African Americans. Was the Obama Administration attempting to set the agenda on racial concerns in specific issue domains? To the extent that comparative data is available, did Obama Administration officials attend to racial issues more or less often than their predecessors? It begins with a comparative analysis of the substance of executive orders in the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations. Next press releases from four Cabinet departments are examined: Labor, Education, Health and Human Services, and Justice. Finally, it looks at federal reports issued in the wake of police shootings of unarmed blacks and then turn to a comparative discussion of presidential pardons and commutations.

While the early songs written by The Clash were firmly rooted in certain neighbourhoods in West London, over time the imaginary of the band would become ever more closely connected to the fabled streets of New York. In the early 1980s, as the four-piece faced incessant criticism from their erstwhile champions in the British music press, they would find a rather warmer reception from American audiences. In this chapter, the author offers a critical exploration of the complex relationship between The Clash and their adopted town of New York. One of the more progressive outcomes of the American odysseys that dominated the latter half of the group’s career was their enthusiasm for emergent and multicultural musical forms. They would, for instance, become the first white artists to record a song inspired by the then nascent black American genre of hip hop. Although The Clash would remain sincere champions of a multicultural society, the chapter casts doubts on whether this message had any real impact on an audience that was overwhelmingly white and would only become more so when the release of Combat Rock confirmed the band as a major stadium act in the United States.

The introduction begins by recounting the immediate legacy of Obama’s presidency following the 2016 US election. Gillespie brings her own story to the fore as she recounts the affect this influx of news stories had on her. The chapter then moves on to discuss the symbolism of the presidency and how his critics and supporters reacted when the tenure came to an end. It examines job approval among diverse ethnic groups and the ‘ambivalence’ shared by many of them at a president who may not have done as much as he could to support the African American community.

The appeal of The Clash often seems to hinge upon the band’s passionate denunciations of a world ever more animated by the impulses of profit and war. While the band are well known for their sense of passion, this chapter suggests they should also be remembered for their profound, but often overlooked, sense of pathos. This thread of melancholy is traced to twin principal sources: the autobiographical detail of the peripatetic and abandoned figure of Joe Strummer, and the ever more despondent geopolitical context in which the charismatic front man crafted his indelible lyrics. While the songs that The Clash committed to vinyl might well be heard as documents of political defeat, it is perhaps that particular feel of pathos that lends them their abiding, maybe even contemporary, political power. Drawing on the work of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, it is argued that the vein of ‘left melancholia’ that courses through the band’s back catalogue identifies them as resources for political struggle in the here and now, requiring us to act as ‘ragpickers’ gathering the cultural tributes from our dismal past that map a path towards a more progressive future.

Here, Barack Obama’s ‘unwavering support’ amongst the African American demographic is studied by taking a look at a satirical sketch from SNL as well as real data from Gallup’s analytics. The chapter discusses the dichotomy between this support and the worsening conditions generally for black Americans during the Obama Administration and comments upon why this may be.The chapter then assesses the reaction of African American public opinion on the record of the Obama Presidency by turning to black citizens themselves to answer the question of whether ‘symbolic politics’ is enough. Using public opinion data, black Americans are asked how satisfied they are with President Obama’s performance on racial issues and determine the relationship between satisfaction with the president’s racial performance and general job approval ratings and enthusiastic electoral support for President Obama in 2012 by using qualitative and quantitative data sources.

Few bands are quite so intimately associated with a specific locale as The Clash. The iconography of the band is, of course, closely bound up with a cluster of neighbourhoods in West London and symbolised most dramatically in the form of the Westway urban flyover. This chapter explores the very particular ways in which the band conjure up a certain moment in the history of the British capital, and in doing so how they mediate the ever more complex connections between Englishness and Britishness. While The Clash may have had intimate ties to the neighbourhoods around Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove, this rootedness was always entirely compatible with a broader view of the world. Indeed, one might be said to have fed into the other. It was in part their connection to specific districts of multiracial London that allowed the band a wider cultural and political palette than many of their peers in the punk scene. In order to explore a world riven with conflict and inequality, The Clash after all simply had to unlock the global politics that existed already on their doorstep.

Across the Manchester conurbation discussions were occurring during the early 1880s on how the city’s soccer playing community could strengthen. This chapter discusses how the growing network of clubs, players and enthusiasts established a regional structure. It focuses on the development of the Manchester County Football Association and the establishment of local competitions, following the aborted attempt to establish a Manchester–Staffordshire Football Association in 1876. The development of a regional football association aided the growth of soccer in Manchester but by 1894 it was still claimed that rugby football was more popular among the working classes of the city than any other sport. Association football was still some way off becoming Manchester’s leading team activity across the population, even though it had developed at pace between 1878 and 1892.

That moment when punk first flowered in the UK is so heavily mediated that it is difficult to separate its real meaning from the various fictions that surround it. In this chapter, it is suggested that we need to pare back these multiple mediations in search of the genuinely revolutionary spirit that was abroad in 1977. Due not least to their celebrated synergy with reggae, The Clash attained a political power in that early moment that they would never attain again over the rest of their career. While this flash of creativity would prove to be short-lived, its brevity was central to its potency. As Walter Benjamin suggests, moments such as punk interrupt the continuity of capitalist history, their momentary flowering leaving traces that can provide the substance of future cultural struggles. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that we need to bear this in mind, to recognise that the early songs that The Clash wrote in one period of geopolitical crisis in the distant past might yet prove the inspiration for another generation in this current age of turbulence.

At the heart of the mythology of punk rock is the notion that it was driven solely by a ‘do it yourself’ ethic that denounced the technical virtuosity of the most celebrated recording artists that came before. Drawing on the first-hand experience of a former manager of the band, this chapter suggests that the success of The Clash originated not in this much-lauded DIY culture but rather in a much more conventional and traditional dedication to their craft. That the band were able to sustain a commercially successful and artistically innovative career for so long was because they were absolutely committed to striving for ever greater levels of musical excellence. This commitment ensured that for all the compromises they were required to make, The Clash retained a palpable ‘authenticity’ that enabled them to challenge the artistic constraints of the ‘corporate voice’.

A central attribute of The Clash was from the very outset a curiosity about, and passion for, musical forms well beyond the confines of the stylistically constrained and overwhelmingly white early punk scene. This chapter suggests that the songs the band recorded together represent a critical moment in which it was imagined that a racially divided UK might have a multicultural, postcolonial future. The engagement of The Clash with reggae in particular widened the cultural horizons of their mainly white audience, while their endorsement of Rock Against Racism was an important gesture at a time when the punk movement was under threat of infiltration from the far right. In addition, the work and spirit of the band paved the way for other artists exploring multicultural forms, not least those on the Two Tone label. This influence remains undiminished today and the chapter documents the many contemporary black British artists who have covered songs by The Clash. As the authors of an important and enduring multicultural dialogue, the band should be acknowledged then as among the authors of the ‘outernationalisation’ of an ever more racially diverse British society.