An Introduction

This volume on "The Arts in Place" looks at what social history can contribute to our understanding of the arts and what social historians can learn from such inquiry. Specialists of specific genres of art dominate scholarship on the arts—art historians examine visual art; musicologists analyze music—while social historians most often have investigated popular culture, the artistic realm of a broader populace. This volume brings together social history and arts to offer methodological insights, particularly on visual and spatial aspects of the past, as well as new historical perspectives on urban development and the role of foreigners and foreignness in 20th century U.S. essays by Mark Tebeau, Benjamin Looker, Alison Isenberg, and Julia Foulkes expose the intertwining of urbanization and arts; those by Sarah Schrank, Fabiana Serviddio, Glenn Reynolds, and Julie Nicoletta explore the arts' role in transmuting the foreign. These essays insist that the arts—as collective, social practice—yield insights of disturbance, change, and ambivalence, both now and in the past, that we overlook at our loss. Examining the arts in place demonstrates both their specificity and their power.