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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 impact. 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 vital 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 focuses on the marble cutters, burial society members, journalists, and tourists who shaped these graveyards into internationally recognizable emblems of the city. In addition to these cultural actors, Dedek’s exploration of cemetery architecture reveals the impact 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 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 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. During this time, cultural and religious 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, however, 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 each 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.
"To those who may be encountering Louisiana for the first time through these wonderful stories-prepare to be engaged and entertained to a degree to which you are certainly unaccustomed . . . Barbara's gift for storytelling holds in the written word just as it does before a television camera."-Phillip J. Jones, former secretary, Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism "A personal, anecdotal narrative that paints events with evocative descriptions . . . best savored in slices-it serves up a great bedtime read."-New Orleans Times-Picayune Based on the PBS documentary of the same name that aired across the country, The Haunting of Louisiana highlights many of the stories that would not fit into the one-hour television program. Louisiana's haunted reputation is spotlighted in the twenty chapters that cover the ghostly escapades and happenings at Oak Alley Plantation, Ormond Plantation, Destrehan Manor, and America's "most haunted home," the Myrtles, in St. Francisville, to name a few. The book also includes behind-the-scenes incidents that occurred during the taping of the documentary. Who is the lady in the photograph whose mirrored reflection appears headless in a bedroom in Oak Alley Plantation? Why are little girls the only tour visitors to experience the taunting of Chloe, a slave and mistress of the owner of the Myrtles in the 1800s? Whose invisible hand had to be repeatedly pushed away from the owner's car horn at Chretien Point Plantation before the owner could get a good night's rest? The spine-tingling explanations for these events and many others are just waiting to be discovered.
In Tearing Down the Lost Cause: The Removal of New Orleans's Confederate Statues James Gill and Howard Hunter examine New Orleans’s complicated relationship with the history of the Confederacy pre– and post–Civil War. The authors open and close their manuscript with the dramatic removal of the city’s Confederate statues. On the eve of the Civil War, New Orleans was far more cosmopolitan than Southern, with its sizable population of immigrants, Northern-born businessmen, and white and Black Creoles. Ambivalent about secession and war, the city bore divided loyalties between the Confederacy and the Union. However, by 1880 New Orleans rivaled Richmond as a bastion of the Lost Cause. After Appomattox, a significant number of Confederate veterans moved into the city giving elites the backing to form a Confederate civic culture. While it’s fair to say that the three Confederate monuments and the white supremacist Liberty Monument all came out of this dangerous nostalgia, the authors argue that each monument embodies its own story and mirrors the city and the times. The Lee monument expressed the bereavement of veterans and a desire to reconcile with the North, though strictly on their own terms. The Davis monument articulated the will of the Ladies Confederate Memorial Association to solidify the Lost Cause and Southern patriotism. The Beauregard Monument honored a local hero, but also symbolized the waning of French New Orleans and rising Americanization. The Liberty Monument, throughout its history, represented white supremacy and the cruel hypocrisy of celebrating a past that never existed. While the book is a narrative of the rise and fall of the four monuments, it is also about a city engaging history. Gill and Hunter contextualize these statues rather than polarize, interviewing people who are on both sides including citizens, academics, public intellectuals, and former mayor Mitch Landrieu. Using the statues as a lens, the authors construct a compelling narrative that provides a larger cultural history of the city.
Death Embraced is like no other book you have ever read. Fascinating and entertaining, it leads readers to ponder issues that should not be avoided. Some may want to use it as a guide to visiting New Orleans graveyards . . . or as a guide to life. "An amazing book by an even more amazing writer, historian and educator with vast knowledge of the Crescent City's history and an intimate understanding of many of the Big Easy's lesser-known cultural traditions and customs. A must-read for anyone who is serious about learning the true history of New Orleans. I dare you to try to put it down after reading its first few pages." -Edmund W. Lewis, Editor, The Louisiana Weekly "A gem of a book, full of little things you didn't know you wanted to know. With subtitle wit and serious depth of knowledge, Mary LaCoste shares the down and dirty of one of New Orleans most mysterious institutions." -Liz Scott, New Orleans Magazine
In this richly illustrated volume, art historian Peggy McDowell and folklorist Richard E. Meyer blend their respective disciplinary perspectives, along with their shared long-standing fascination with cemeteries and funerary material culture, to provide a thoroughgoing descriptive analysis of this dramatic chapter in the history of American memorial art.
Sacred Ground is a sumptuous photographic portrait of New Orleans's legendary cemeteries. Robert S. Brantley celebrates the otherworldly landscapes, intricate ironwork, evocative memorials, and stately monuments as vibrant sites of remembrance. New Orleans history is further revealed through biographies of twenty individuals whose grave sites are among those featured, including entrepreneurs, celebrated musicians, a world-class violin maker, an ex-slave turned minister, a ship's captain, and a young soldier felled by Spanish flu while in basic training for World War I. The rich duotone photographs, organized by cemetery, are followed by an index identifying the tombs and their iconography; an introduction by S. Frederick Starr provides background on New Orleans cemetery history, culture, and burial customs. Sacred Ground provides a stunning exploration of the traditions born of New Orleans's unique religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity.
Updated by the two living original authors, this new paper edition of New Orleans Yesterday and Today provides information on recent additions to the New Orleans scene, including countless new restaurants and music venues, casino gambling, the D-Day Museum, and the Aquarium of the Americas. The book provides a well-rounded sense of New Orleans' unique and multi-faceted culture and its evolution as a city. In addition to being a help to tourists, the book will provide a refresher history course to New Orleans natives.