 I'd really like to know more what happened in organizing this. How did this come about? Who planned it and what was it like to attend and to observe? For example, at noon you hear that you were invited to testify your good disposition to the Patriot cause by bringing your tea. Well, what does it mean if you don't feel like doing it? Does that mean if I don't bring my tea, my neighbors will from here on out know that I don't have a good disposition towards the Patriot cause? Does that label me a Tory who is sympathetic to Britain or to Parliamentary power? Similarly, this point that there appeared great cheerfulness in destroying the tea and that these worthy women made free will offerings of their stocks of the tea. Well, that's a nice description but you do wonder about those women who maybe didn't want to burn their tea. None of that is covered. If there are women who said, not me, I'm keeping my tea, you don't find that out here. And finally, I think the real clue to the question of coercion or not comes in the last sentence describing a spirited son of liberty going along the street with his brush and lamp block and unpainting the word tea on the shop sign. Well, one wonders what the merchants whose shops those were, where presumably they sold tea, thought about that and it strikes me that we don't have any information here if did we get permission from these merchants ahead of time or was this an act that put the merchants in a position where they would have to become quite unpopular with the Patriots if they decided to continue selling tea. One of the first things I do is keep by me a dictionary so I could look up words particularly a dictionary like the Oxford English dictionary that has 18th century meanings because often there's word that will have changed in meaning. One example, they use the term the true interest of America, the term interesting which people in the 18th century used to describe a situation that's an interesting situation. It doesn't mean I'm kind of interested in it intellectually. It means it involves people's economic interest. They mean interest exactly in that sense almost all the time. And there are other examples. So one thing would be don't be too far away from a good dictionary and preferably one that can tell you how things were used in the 18th century. I'd certainly look for any references to people or events and make sure I knew what those were. Look in the history books, see if I could find out who's being referred to, who they assume everyone knows about. I'd go real carefully through the sentences because 18th century language often the sentences are very long with lots of different clauses which is complicated for us to understand today. And certainly with newspapers at this time period where there are other Patriot or Tory newspapers we'd be looking for the point of view of the writer. In this case this is a point of view of someone who's in favor of the Patriot. So that gives us the last thing which is I'd look for what isn't here. And in the case of the Patriot point of view well we don't hear about anybody in Providence who disagreed with this. We don't know if there was or was not someone. That's simply absent from this.