Papers of the War Department : 1784 to 1800 is a searchable archive of documents from the early history of the United States that, until recently, were thought to have been irretrievably lost in a fire. Over the past decade, researchers have searched for copies of these documents in collections throughout the country, and have reconstructed the collection online.
This could also be viewed as a lesson of the benefits of distributed copies of valuable documents/information.
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