Arts & Media

A country is not only its offices. It is also the novels people read on the train, the films that filled the picture houses, the songs everyone knew the words to, and the newspapers that told them what to be angry about. The United Kingdom of America has a constitutional culture, but it also has a popular one, and this domain documents the second: what the Union made, watched, printed, and sang.

The Crown-realm setting gives American culture a distinct grain. The monarchy that Ernest IV carried into the broadcast age left the wireless and the newsreel woven through national life; the press grew up alongside a Parliament rather than a presidency; and the sister realms traded stories and stars across the Atlantic in ways a republic never would.

How it’s organized

• Literature: the novelists, poets, and essayists of the realm, and the national canon taught in its schools.
• Cinema and television: the picture-house era, the broadcast age, and the modern screen.
• The Internet and the digital age: the Digital Age that shattered the broadcast audience, and the culture, politics, and surveillance of the networked realm.
• Music: popular music and its movements. (The formal and ceremonial side lives in National and Patriotic Music.)
• The press: the great newspapers and the tradition of a Crown-realm free press.
• Art and architecture: public art, the look of the cities, and the styles the realm built in.

What will live here

Two articles are live: The Broadcast Era, the half-century when the realm listened and watched together, and its successor, The Digital Age, the era the Internet made, where the shared audience shattered and the surveillance state rose. Still to come: a national literature overview, the great newspapers, and the movements of popular music. Written in the voice of a good arts section, critical and alive, not constitutional.

Adjacent: Society & Daily Life · National and Patriotic Music · People