L’United States Department of War, chiamato anche War Office, era la struttura responsabile delle operazioni militari dell’esercito americano dal 1789.
Per saperne di più sul War Office, leggi:
United States War Department
War Department .

Papers of the War Department 1784-1800 è la digitalizzazione di più di 55.000 documenti ufficiali prodotti dal dipartimento. La digitalizzazione è tanto più preziosa considerando che questi documenti erano andati distrutti in un incendio (8 novembre del 1800). L’archivio è stato “ricostruito” attingendo ad altri fondi archivistici di Stati Uniti, Gran Bretagna e Canada.
Potete fare una ricerca libera o scorrere le liste per ordine di data del documento o per persona .

Questa una breve descrizione del loro contenuto:
These Papers record far more than the era’s military history. Between 1784 and 1800, the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, naval affairs (until 1798), as well as militia and army matters. During the 1790s, the Secretary of War spent seven of every ten dollars of the federal budget (debt service excepted). The War Office did business with commercial firms and merchants all across the nation; it was the nation’s largest single consumer of fabric, clothing, shoes, food, medicine, building materials, and weapons of all kinds. “Follow the money,” it is said, if you want to learn what really happened, and in the early days of the Republic that money trail usually led to the War Office. For example, the War Department operated the nation’s only federal social welfare program, providing veterans’ benefits (including payments to widows and orphans) to more than 4,000 persons. It also provided internal security, governance, and diplomacy on the vast frontier, and it was the instrument that shaped relations with Native Americans. In many respects, the papers lost in the War Office fire of 1800 constituted the “national archives” of their time.