446. Stephen Winick, part 2

<div>446. Part 2 of our <a href="http://archive.org/download/446-stephen-winick-part-2/446--stephen_winick--part_2.mp3" target="_blank">conversation</a> with Stephen Winick, of the Library of Congress. In 1902, on a prairie in southwest Louisiana, six members of a farming family are found murdered. Albert Edwin Batson, a white, itinerant farm worker, rapidly descends from likely suspect to likely lynching victim as people in the surrounding countryside lusted for vengeance. <span><a name='more'></a></span> In a territory where the locals were coping with the opening of the prairies by the railroad and the disorienting, disruptive advances of the rice and oil industries into what was predominantly cattle country, Batson, an outsider, made an ideal scapegoat. Stephen has studied the events of the time, and the ballads that were written about the death of Batson. He has written about all of it on the <a href="https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/07/i-didnt-done-the-crime-stavin-chains-batson-and-the-batson-case/" target="_blank">Library of Congress blog</a>.<br /><ol type="a"><li>This week in Louisiana history. December 4, 1919. The famous French Opera House of New Orleans burns down. </li><li>This week in New Orleans history. The French Opera House burned in the early morning hours of December 4, 1919. By dawn, the building was in ruins. The cause of the fire was never determined, although it was widely believed to have begun in the restaurant housed in the building. For years, New Orleanians cherished hopes of rebuilding the theater and resurrecting the elegant days of French opera, but in the 1960s a modern hotel (now the Inn on Bourbon) was erected on the site. Until the construction of the Theater of the Performing Arts in 1973, New Orleans was without a permanent home for opera.<br /> </li><li>This week in Louisiana. <