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http://wardepartmentpapers.orgAfter a traumatic and devastating fire in 1800, many historians thoughthat the early files of the United States War Department wereessentially lost forever. Thankfully, the Center for History and NewMedia at George Mason University recently completed a decade longproject to locate all of these records and place them online here. Thecollection is a very important one, because during this time period theWar Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, andnaval affairs. The project was begun in earnest by Ted Crackel in themid-1990s and it involved visits to over 200 repositories and consultingover 3,000 collections in the United States, Canada, England, France,and Scotland. Now, visitors can browse through 55,000 documents, andalso perform detailed searches, complete with links to digitized imagesof each document. Interested parties can also browse the collection byyear or person of interest. In short, this is an extremely valuableproject that will be of interest to those with a penchant for Americanhistory, and early American military history in particular.