January 2011

1. 1606: The Virginia Company is formed to seek profit from a new business: American settlement.

2. 1612: John Rolfe plants West Indian tobacco in Virginia, the cash crop that assures the colony’s success.

3. 1614: John Smith, finding no gold, sets his men to fishing for cod off New England, pointing the way to the area’s first economic mainstay.

4. 1619: The first blacks arrive in Virginia as indentured servants. Within a few decades slavery becomes the dominant labor system in the South.

5. 1626: The Dutch settle Manhattan, founding the most commercially minded city on earth.

6. 1646: Saugus Iron Works begins operation in Massachusetts, the first major American industrial enterprise.

7. 1652: The first pine tree shilling is minted, giving Massachusetts a reliable money supply.

After the 300th anniversary celebrations of 2006, Albuquerque continues to offer the visitor a wide range of diversions. For more information, go to the Convention and Visitors Bureau at www.abqcvb.org .

Russel Wright: Creating American Lifestyle was published to accompany an exhibition at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Dealers that showcase his wares include All Wright ( www.all-wright.com ) and Mood Indigo ( www.moodindigonewyork.com ). Wright aluminum items are sometimes reproduced to precise specifications, and examples can be found at Highbrow Furniture ( www.highbrowfurniture.com ). To find out about tours of Manitoga, Wright’s home in Garrison, New York, visit www.russelwrightcenter.org .

Aluminum ore, prevalent in the earth’scrust from time immemorial, wasn’t transformed into metal until the 1800s. The initial cost of the process was exorbitant, and by the third quarter of the century it remained high enough to make aluminum as expensive as silver. Both metals were then considered precious, and aluminum was used in the King of Denmark’s crown as well as in the facing of the Washington Monument. After the American chemist Charles Martin Hall developed a less expensive way of producing it, aluminum’s price dropped considerably, and by 1930 its modest cost and a fashionable machine-age aesthetic combined to make it a logical material for household objects. A fledgling industrial designer named Russel Wright was quick to adapt it to the purpose.

Robert Altman’s entire career, which ranged from episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in 1957 to the pleasant and strangely elegiac A Prairie Home Companion last year, was summed up after the 1992 Academy Awards. A television journalist asked the director of The Player , perhaps the best movie ever made about the inner workings of Hollywood, why the industry’s research tanks couldn’t determine what moviegoers wanted to see. “Because,” he replied, “what they want to see is something they haven’t seen before, and they don’t know what that is.”

Altman’s half-century as a director was fueled by a desire to give viewers something they hadn’t seen before. He was prolific, perhaps too prolific for a filmmaker who was self-consciously innovative; his credits list 35 feature films and a number of mini-series and TV films, not to mention scores of television episodes, which, in addition to “Hitchcock,” include “Hawaiian Eye,” “Sugarfoot,” “Bonanza,” “Maverick,” “Combat,” “Route 66,” and even “The Gale Storm Show.”

Kurt Andersen, the founder of Spy magazine, is the author of Turn of the Century , a scathingly funny satire of American mores at the end of the last millennium, and now Heyday (Random House, 640 pages, $26.95), an exhilarating cutaway view of America in the pivotal year of 1848. I spoke with Andersen about his new book and the state of the American historical novel.— Allen Barra

1848 was a big year for Western history. But it certainly hasn’t been a subject much touched on by American novelists. What inspired you to write 640 pages about it?