Claire Baumgartner

1) An op-ed on a labor dispute involving public school teachers from before 1970

• To find this I first went to ProQuest and simply typed in “1970 public schools+labor dispute” and came up with 0 results.
• I then just searched “public school labor dispute” and got 20884 results.
• I narrowed down the search by specifying that I wanted a letter to the editor, which left me with 413 results.
• I further narrowed my search by choosing a time frame (1960-1969) and was left with 86 articles
• When I narrowed it further (to 1969 only) I found this article, written about a social workers in the public schools by Mrs. Mary Lee Brady to the Chicago Tribune in January of 1969.

2) The first documented use of solar power in the United States

• I first entered the term “solar power” into ProQuest and came up with loads of entries that I couldn’t possibly narrow down, as I had no idea what time period I should be looking in.
• I then entered the phrase “use of solar power” and sorted the 135 entries by date (oldest first) instead of relevance.
• I got this  article from the Boston Globe in November of 1940, which tells about the sun’s heat causing a water boiler to heat within five minutes. While this is probably not the very first solar power encounter in the US, it seems to be a big enough feat (at the time) to at least be quite early on in the study of solar power.

3) The best resource for the history of California ballot initiatives, including voting data

• Disclaimer: I wasn’t quite sure what to be looking for with this one; it doesn’t make much sense to me. But I did my best!
• Using ProQuest (perhaps my favorite search tool) I looked up “California ballots” and got a lot of unrelated answers.
• So I narrowed the search to “California ballot initiatives” and was on the right track- only 11 results came up.
• Again, I’m not really sure of the parameters of this item, but I found an article from a 1988 issue of The Christian Science Monitor about a California ballot initiative and found it interesting regardless.

This scavenger hunt was quite a long process, and very frustrating. I think that it’s nearly impossible to find items to these exact specifications, especially #2 and #3. With #2, the first documented case of solar power being used in the US could have been published in a tiny town newspaper, or in a foreign newspaper-who knows? #3 is a little subjective, if I’m honest, because it’s our opinion of what’s the best resource. It all depends on preferences and the kind of format in which people best absorb information.