Best wishes, John Green. So the Boston Tea Party led to further British crackdowns and then mobilization of colonial militias and then Paul Revere and then actual war, but you can hear all about that stuff on like TV miniseries. I want to focus on one of the ways that colonists protested unfair taxation. Let's go to the Thought Bubble. As previously noted, the English crown benefited tremendously from the import of consumer goods to the American colonies, and one of the most effective ways American colonists could protest taxation without representation was by boycotting British products. In order to enforce these boycotts, the protesters created committees of correspondence, which spread information about who was and was not observing the boycotts, and these committees also could coerce non-compliers into compliance, which is to say that they were creating and enforcing policy, kind of like a government does. The Maryland Committee of Correspondence, in fact, was instrumental in setting up the first Continental Congress, which convened to coordinate a response to the fighting that started in 1775.