For the public school teacher’s labor dispute, I assumed it would be pretty easy to find information on it. I went to proquest historical newspapers, clicked on the New York Times, and searched “public school teachers labor dispute.” Immediately I was greeted by a host of articles that I feel would meet the requirement of the scavenger hunt. This article, which discusses a labor dispute in New York in 1969 and the possible national ramifications of outlawing public workers strikes (especially when you don’t solve the problem that caused the strikes in the first place), is probably the best.

The first thing I did was to gage when solar power possibly first used. Wikipedia states that it first began to be developed in the 1860s. My first task was to look through historical journals to see if they mentioned anything. I decided to only look at journals in the 1860s. In terms of searching historic journals for references, it’s not looking good. The earliest journal that seems to discuss solar power is this one by the “Journal of theal Society of the Arts.” However, this journal revealed an interesting facet of information. Apparently, people also referred to it as sun power. And unfortunately, that one article was the only article to refer to solar power as “sun power”. Next up: newspaper articles! Again, my first task is to find a newspaper that has articles dating back from some time in the 1860s. Those are: the Atlanta Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. Searches for “solar power” before 1870 do not yield any clues. Well the first documented use of solar power that I can find was the invention of a solar engine by Frank Shuman. I’m almost positive that this is not the first invention, however, because this article elludes to the development of solar energy, and was written 8 years before Shuman’s invention was reported on. Nevertheless, at the very least, reading the article on Shuman’s invention is quite entertaining, as it discusses (among other things) how in the “future” we will use artificial volcanos as giant furnaces to power and heat our homes.  Yep.

I cannot find a single comprehensive source which covers the entirety of California’s ballot initiative history among scholarly, peer reviewed journals. However, I did find a great source from California’s official website, ca.gov. To find it I simply googled california ballot initiative history and statistics. It should be noted that the search engine used to find this was Microsoft’s Bing, not Google.