Try finding a newspaper article!
Using the chronology linked above, pick an event that happened after 1851.
Search the New York Times to see if you can find an article that reports on the event within about a month of it happening. You may need to try different keywords and/or use the date limiters, and there's no guarantee that the NYT covered every event.
If you have time, see if you can find a second article using one of the collections below.
All states:
Western states:
Use the date range limit to narrow your search to a relevant time period. To see if a specific newspaper is included in any of these collections, search for the title in the A-Z List of Journal Titles.
These links allow you to search across multiple databases at the same time.