For our country without a monarch, Queen Elizabeth II offered stability for 70 years and made U.S. presidents look like mayflies. She died Thursday aged 96.
For our country without a monarch, Queen Elizabeth II offered stability for 70 years and made U.S. presidents look like mayflies. She died Thursday aged 96.
The queen was a regular fixture in American living rooms, both as fiction and figurehead. For better and worse, she was the queen of TV. Her coronation in 1953 was watched by some 20 million in Great Britain and many millions more in the United States, and around the globe, on a tape delay. The event played an outsized role in bringing glass-fronted boxes into most living rooms and restored a bit of glory to the erstwhile British Empire.
Young Queen Elizabeth’s coronation brought the once-distant monarchy into our homes. It also took what was previously a giant institution and made it pocket-sized. It shook the dust off an aged and ancient throne.
