Betsy Phillips

@betsyphillips.bsky.social

A loud-mouth on the internet.

Y'all, this Sidney Hirsch manuscript. I feel so cheated that, in all the time I've been here, we never had a thousand-person epic theater performance in the lawn at the Parthenon that one in ten Nashvillians attended.

Y'all, here is why you have to look at things a bunch of different times. I started out looking at the Higgins sisters by finding them in the 1860 census. Then I spent all week digging into their family and found their sister married to a Bledsoe. Then I come back to the 1860 census and I find a

Y'all. The Higgins family just gets more interesting to me. So, we have the two sisters who are wealthy as fuck sex workers. We have the two brothers who clearly benefitted from the money while the sisters were alive but then pretended not to know them later.

There are two sisters who each ran “houses of ill-fame” in Nashville in the 1800s—Rebecca and Eliza Higgins. And I mean for almost forty years they did this. I think that Eliza ran a franchise of her older sister’s business.

I love reading about old-timey fights, because they're always like "John Smith and Edward Bell joined in a fight in the street over a parcel. A lewd woman leaned out the window and she and her terrier joined in the fray."

Every time I try to use AI for a task I could hand my eight year old nephew if he were allowed to work under Tennessee law, it makes me want to bang my head against my desk. Why doesn't it just fucking work?

I know everyone’s afraid to hire Black women bc it might make a white man upset but I need some work. I have 5-figure medical debt, a cat that needs a vet appt 😿, a medically complex household, the usual bills that come with adulthood, and I’d love to get good skincare again 😩 HIRE ME.