Description
Book SynopsisReveals the origins and evolution of the Crescent City’s world-famous necropolises, exploring both their distinctive architecture and their cultural impact. Peter Dedek 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.
Trade ReviewHistorians have given surprisingly scant attention to New Orleans's cemeteries, leaving the topic to popular accounts, tourism guidebooks, and coffee-table pictorials. Peter Dedek finally fills this void with an impressively researched and copiously illustrated study that sets the cemeteries into their historical and geographical contexts. . . . The wide-ranging discussion of architectural traits forms the strength of this study. Dedek skillfully critiques the architecture of the tombs [and his] close reading of tombs rediscovers overlooked communities from the city's past. . . . A must-read for scholars and general readers interested in New Orleans and the Gulf South." -
Louisiana History"Anthropologists and historians have long recognized that the form and function of cemeteries reveal cultural values and practices. Historian and preservationist Peter Dedek's
The Cemeteries of New Orleans: A Cultural History is an engaging contribution that sheds light on these topics. . . . Dedek's careful study of tomb designs and his tomb typology appendix provide an opportunity for future research into a comparison between mortuary architecture and the built environment of the surrounding cityscape." -
Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum
