Comments on: Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800

Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800

Knappster — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:41:18 -0800

Fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, and for decades historians believed that the collection, and the window it provided into the workings of the early federal government, was lost forever. Thanks to a decade-long effort to retrieve copies of the files scattered in archives across the country, the collection has been reconstituted and is offered here as a fully-searchable digital database.

By: Donnie VandenBos

Donnie VandenBos — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:14:11 -0800

Thank you for posting this, Knappster. I am going to waste far too many hours with this.

By: marxchivist

marxchivist — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:15:29 -0800

As a former archivist and current records manager, I got two things to say: 1. This is great, thanks for posting it. 2. It is time for me to get some sleep.

By: king walnut

king walnut — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:16:50 -0800

OCR software that could convert the old-fangled handwriting in these documents would truly be the lord king god of OCR software.

By: winna

winna — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:28:13 -0800

Oh this is sweet! Thanks for posting it!

By: LarryC

LarryC — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 23:29:03 -0800

This is another great project from the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Sad to see the late Roy Rosenzweig listed as Principal Investigator on the project. It would be nice to see a few more search features here. Some documents include the image, others do not, and it would be good to be able to filter searches to show only records with images. And some user interaction--adding tags, making notes, even allowing for user transcriptions would make it even stronger.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 05:36:13 -0800

Terrific post, thanks!

By: rokusan

rokusan — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 07:12:15 -0800

Dick Cheney's favorite piece of American history.

By: a3matrix

a3matrix — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:00:39 -0800

What an amazing effort. Thanks for posting this.

By: marxchivist

marxchivist — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:17:53 -0800

I've spent a few minutes looking through this, it is a very noble effort and could be very useful. I wish there was more information on the project itself which I would find almost as interesting as the papers themselves.

By: gudrun

gudrun — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 11:38:05 -0800

Very, very cool. *This* is why I come to Metafilter. Thanks!