How are the children? And so if you could answer that question and help set the stage for the Milwaukee Reading Coalition and the work that we're doing.

So thanks very much, Joanne, and thanks to all of you all for having me.

It's been a while since I was invited to speak to Rotary.

I think it was something I said the last time I was here.

But seriously, I've really had the opportunity, as I said, to speak to Rotary.

And it was the Rotary Club that actually helped me run a superintendent out of town.

I don't know if you all know the history of that, but I won't go into that.

So what is the something that we're trying to do, Howard?

How do events come to pass there?

Well, like you pointed out, Don, earlier, which was a very good point to make, the US after the War of 1812 feels rather bitten by the fact that the British Navy is able to bottle up their, uh, fleet for the most part and, uh, destroy Union commerce, and then eventually carry out combined operation strikes, uh, culminating in this, you know, this sort of sacking of Washington, DC, the new national capital.

So, Congress and presidential leaders ever afterwards, particularly like Monroe, say, "Look, we don't necessarily need a large standing army.

We don't necessarily need a big navy that's gonna try to compete with Britain.

We probably will never achieve it.

But we can build, uh, coastal defenses.

We can invest heavily in forts." And this then leads subsequently to what's called a third sort of tier, a third system of coastal defenses in the US.

This is gonna go much better for the Union this time.

Can you tell us a bit more about him and his background in ship design?

design?Yeah, well, th- that's another interesting feature of this particular drama, you know, th- this story, which is so compelling, is that Coles didn't have a background in ship design.

He was a war veteran.

He had fought in the Crimean War.

Uh, he was very brave.

Uh, he withstood Russian, you know, cannon fire when they were attacking the forts at Sevastopol.

Uh, he was there.

So take us through everything that's happened and update us beyond what has happened since we ran the article.