Steve Marsh explores political culture by foregrounding the contribution that diplomatic pageantry has made to official representations of Anglo-American relations. Through analysis of bilateral summit meetings between presidents and prime ministers, the informal ambassadorship of the British royal family, and the forthcoming 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage in 2020, Marsh demonstrates that such events are designed and choreographed to assure elite, media, and popular attention. His work illuminates how the official deployment of a selective narrative of Anglo-American relations serves to (re-)legitimize the concept of the special relationship and enhance its ability to adapt to changed circumstances.

Sam Edwards describes the period 1890–1925 as the first age of transatlantic memory diplomacy, a period in which the potential of commemoration as a mechanism through which to strengthen Anglo-American ties was first explored. Focusing on British efforts to re-Anglicize George Washington, he analyzes the placement of a new statue of the first US president outside London’s National Gallery as well as the rededication and memorialization of Sulgrave Manor, Washington’s ancestral family estate in Northamptonshire. Of particular interest to Edwards is the agency of both government elites and private associations, particularly the US National Society of Colonial Dames, and he perspicaciously dissects the intersections of gender roles, racial constructs, social class, strategic objectives, and patriotic identities that determined the goals and methods of commemoration in this era.

David Ryan assesses the ways in which the Western military interventions in Kosovo (1999) and Iraq (2003) were influenced by Anglo-American efforts to manipulate collective memory. Explaining how narratives of the special relationship employed by British prime minister Tony Blair and US presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were augmented by civilizational discourse and memories of past Anglo-American partnership, Ryan demonstrates how strategic concerns, foreign policy, and domestic politics were shaped by systems of meaning that had the ability to both empower and constrain, and bind or blind, British and American leaders.

The introduction contextualizes the substance of Culture Matters in three sections. The first section locates the book within important debates about the history of the special relationship and illuminates why an expanded consideration of culture is important to the field. The second section introduces the main ideas and benefits of the ‘cultural turn’ in diplomatic history and international relations, which has operationalized culture as a key to understanding the behavior of states in the global system and inspired diverse analytical approaches. Finally, the third section explains the volume’s structure and central themes as well as introduces the individual chapters, which illuminate the mosaic of cultural connections that have simultaneously influenced elite decision-making and sculpted popular attitudes toward and expectations of the special relationship.

Srdjan Vucetic builds upon his previous work on the cultural infrastructure of British society by examining the meanings of America embedded in British school textbooks published throughout the period of the special relationship. As textbooks directly shape, and are shaped by, the discourses of national identity, this source material is fertile ground for the assessment of representations of the United States, and by extension Anglo-American relations, which exist in the British national consciousness. Vucetic employs an inductivist discourse analysis of textbooks to identify three ‘master images’ of the United States that have been mostly positive, exhibit impressive continuity over time, and have the ability to influence the cultural underpinnings of the special relationship.

Finn Pollard explores P. G. Wodehouse’s early twentieth-century fiction and charts the evolution of the famous author’s portrayals of the United States and its people from his initial use of common archetypes to much more complicated themes and character relationships, including Anglo-American friendships as well as romantic entanglements. Pollard delves into the period influences that contributed to this evolution, including the boys’ school story, the nature of London theatre, and Anglo-American romance novels, and seeks to illuminate why Wodehouse’s British and American characters mingled with increasing ease, were at times treated as interchangeable, and asserted a mutually positive relationship. Ultimately, this exploration of popular literature suggests readers in both countries were increasingly exposed to a new, influential, and warmer narrative of Anglo-American relations in the period preceding the Great War.

Dana Cooper assesses the cultural power of television in her analysis of Anglo-American narratives within the PBS series Downton Abbey, which became a financial success as well as a cultural phenomenon following its launch in 2010. Pointing out that the show’s aristocratic central family is inspired by the historical ‘dollar princesses,’ the hundreds of wealthy American women who married British men between 1865 and 1945, Cooper scrutinizes how the fictional characters, their dialogue, and their biases reflect American perceptions of themselves and their cultural cousins, and vice versa, and questions just how Anglo-American identity differences transitioned over time from sources of tension to sources of popular entertainment.