This blog post will discuss the ways in which mourning practices in America and New Orleans reflect traditions from around the world; the commercialization of mourning, which was primarily geared towards a Christian audience (white or free people of color); and profile a few local businesses were involved in this trade, and what types of goods and services they supplied—from transportation to personal accessories to tombs.

When HGGHH staff recently relocated one pair of hand-wrought iron andirons in HGH’s 1830s kitchen, the resulting examination inspired further investigation into other related examples.

Thanksgiving is a festive occasion in New Orleans today, but in the nineteenth century, Southern states resisted the holiday. Thanksgiving was a “Yankee” holiday in the minds of Southerners, partially because its story originated in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, marking it as a regional celebration. But even more so, the South saw Thanksgiving as a challenge to the institution of slavery.

Pre-Lenten festivals, such as the famous carnavale of Venice, Italy, the carnivals throughout Brazil, Latin America, and the Caribbean, and of course, New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, are often described—and idealized—as “festivals of inversion.” Historically, as moments in which the populace were invited to indulge themselves in the earthly pleasures they would soon give up for the forty-day period of Lent preceding Easter, Pre-Lenten carnivals also quickly became moments for “permissible” social transgression—men could dress as women, women as men, the rich masquerade as poor, and the poor crowned as kings and queens for a day. While this kind of role reversal—what scholars have termed “social inversion”—undoubtedly has been a central part of Pre-Lenten festivities throughout their long history, many historians recently have sought to bring more nuance to the discussion of Carnival. Particularly when so many of the most famous Pre-Lenten festivals take place in former slave-holding colonies of the Americas, it is likely that the participation of enslaved people and free people of color in these carnival celebrations differed considerably from the dominant narrative throughout the celebration’s centuries-long history.