For the online scavenger hunt, the first item to find was an op-ed about a public school teacher labor dispute earlier than 1970.  Seeing how specific the item was, I went to Mason’s library database, and went to ProQuest’s Historical Newspaper portal.  Entering “labor dispute teachers” in the search bar, I went through each article one-by-one, and finally found a story that wasn’t written by a newspaper staff member (the definition of an op-ed) and was dated 1923 .  Here is the article.

The second item I needed to find was the earliest documented use of solar power in the United States.  For this, I went to Wikipedia and searched “solar energy,” and went to the development section of the article.  One of the paragraphs said that solar powered water heaters were used in America starting in the 1890s.  The footnote took me to a reference from an article written in 1981 by Butti and Perlin.  Googling “butti and perlin 1981 solar powered heater” I came across a book on Scribd titled ‘The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book.’  In the book author David Bainbridge says that solar powered water heaters appeared in America as far back as 1895, and shows a newspaper add for a Climax Solar-Water Heater that was published in 1902.  The book and add can be found here.

For the third article I needed to find was a history of California ballot initiatives and voting records.  This one was particularly hard for me to find, searching multiple databases (a number of ProQuest portals and JSTOR) and coming up with nothing.  I ultimately had to Google “california ballot voting data” and went to Sacramento State University’s website.  There I found a link to the university’s election data archive, which has all elections, poll results, and ballot initiatives from 1995 to the present.  The recorded data is here.