Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee: What to know about Britain's big royal party

Few nations have thrown a party like this. 

Britain is set to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, a four-day festival of royal pageantry and public partying to honor her 70-year reign.

She is the world’s third-longest serving monarch in recorded history, the longest of any British or female sovereign. On the throne since 1952 — a time closer to the Statue of Liberty’s completion than it is to the present day — she has become an unshakable emblem of British soft power and perhaps the nation’s most recognizable celebrity around the...