 Normally, I'm a big fan of handing out primary sources and just seeing what they do with it. But I think in this case, I would want to make sure that we had looked at a map together and seen where these places are and seen what's on the Mediterranean and seen maybe the ports, the European ports that Americans were trading in, so they could get a sense of how close you have to get to North African ports and how far their ships would range. I think I might also want to talk with them about what people were trading over there, because that's one of the questions you're left with, is why are Americans trading with Tripoli? And they really aren't trading with Tripoli, but they're taking a whole bunch of flour and wheat over to the European continent is really what they're trading. So I might want to set up some of the context. Why are we going there? What's going on once we're getting there? Who are these Tripolitans? Where are they located so they could get a sense of what was going on? I would ask them to come up with a list of questions from the source so that we could talk about what was confusing to them or talk about some of the things that they were interested in. And what I would hope would come out of that is that they would ask even more detail questions about the relationship and how is the government involved, but also the relationship between the United States and Tripoli. Why Tripoli is taking the ships? I think that would be a really interesting question for them to ask. The other thing I was struck with is at the very end, in the very beginning of this letter, he talks about how long it takes letters to get back and forth. So I think that raises a lot of issues about doing government business if it takes two and three months to get letters back. And of course, Cathcart is probably sending multiple copies of the same letter by various ships hoping that one of them will make it because those ships are very likely to be captured by Algerians, by the French, by the English and never make it home. And in fact, he's kicked out of Tripoli and Tripoli declares war on the United States. And the Americans don't know for another month or so after that war has been declared because he can't get the information back soon enough. So meanwhile, America does send a couple of ships over. And the ships are charged with either making arrangements or attacking. So they're sent with some money and said if you can smooth things over, if you can make things work out all right, that's okay. But if you have to use force, use force. And they get to Gibraltar and they find that war has been declared. And what happens after that is that Americans have, I think it's five ships that's sent as part of that flotilla. And they blockade the Tripolitan port. Unfortunately, they blockade it ineffectively because there are only five ships. And what they find is that the Barbary states in general work together. So they're blockading Tripoli, but Algerian ships take Tripoli goods, Tripoli passengers, and they're able to get into the harbor of Tripoli because we're not officially at war with Algiers. Tunis does the same thing. So they load up goods on their ships and they're able to get into the harbor in America. I can't really do anything about that. Incidentally, at the same time, one of the states that's often part of that Barbary states configuration, Morocco, looks like they're going to declare war as well. So some of those ships are sent down to Morocco to protect American shipping basically past Morocco, which is on the Atlantic and much more able to take American ships.