Papers of the War Department

Static site for the Papers of the War Department, 1784–1800, a project of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The archive reconstructs the War Department's records, destroyed by fire in 1800, from copies held in repositories across the United States.

This repository replaces the original Omeka S site with a Hugo build: ~42,880 documents with metadata, page images, and human and AI transcriptions; ~25 editorial guides; 240 news posts; full-text search via Pagefind.

Requirements

• Hugo extended ≥ 0.128 (built with 0.164)
• Node (for Pagefind)
• uv with Python 3.13 (scripts and tests)
• just

Quick start

npm ci               # pagefind
uv sync              # python deps
just serve           # dev server at http://localhost:1313 (no search index)
just build           # hugo --minify + pagefind → public/
just serve-pagefind  # build and serve with working search
just test            # pytest

Layout

Path	What
content/document/	One markdown file per document: YAML metadata, human transcription as body
content/*.md, content/news/	Editorial pages and blog posts
data/transcriptions_ai.json	AI transcriptions keyed by Omeka ID
data/transcription_dashboard.json	Coverage stats for /transcription-dashboard/
layouts/, static/	Templates and theme assets
scripts/	Python tooling: Omeka fetch, image-list repair, dashboard
_transcription/	AI transcription pipeline (claude -p); see its README
tests/	pytest suite for the scripts
redirects.caddy, Dockerfile	Legacy URL redirects and the deployment image

Document images are served from object storage (mediaBaseURL in hugo.toml), not from this repo.

License

MIT © Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.