The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History

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Description

In The Cemeteries of New Orleans, Peter B. Dedek reveals the origins and evolution of the Crescent City’s world-famous necropolises, exploring both their distinctive architecture and their cultural have an effect on. Spanning centuries, this fascinating body of research takes readers from muddy fields of crude burial markers to extravagantly designed cities of the dead, illuminating a very important and vulnerable piece of New Orleans’s identity.

Where many histories of New Orleans cemeteries have revolved around the famous people buried within them, Dedek makes a speciality of the marble cutters, burial society members, journalists, and tourists who shaped these graveyards into across the world recognizable emblems of the city. Along with these cultural actors, Dedek’s exploration of cemetery architecture reveals the have an effect on of ancient and medieval grave traditions and styles, the city’s geography, and the arrival of trained European tomb designers, such as the French architect J. N. B. de Pouilly in 1833 and Italian artist and architect Pietro Gualdi in 1851.

As Dedek shows, the nineteenth century was once a particularly critical era in the city’s cemetery design. Notably, the cemeteries embodied traditional French and Spanish precedents, until the first garden cemetery―the Metairie Cemetery―was once built on the site of an old racetrack in 1872. Like the older walled cemeteries, this iconic venue served as a lavish expression of fraternal and ethnic unity, a backdrop to exuberant social celebrations, and a destination for sightseeing excursions. All the way through this time, cultural and spiritual practices, such as the celebration of All Saints’ Day and the practice of Voodoo rituals, flourished within the spatial bounds of these resting places. Over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then again, episodes of neglect and destruction gave rise to groups that aimed to preserve the historic cemeteries of New Orleans―an endeavor, which, according to Dedek, is still wanting for resources and political will.

Containing ample primary source material, abundant illustrations, appendices on both tomb styles and the history of every of the city’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cemeteries, The Cemeteries of New Orleans offers a comprehensive and intriguing resource on these fascinating historic sites.

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