Exploring the Industrial Revolution

After we all read and looked over our documents, we started to analyze each document together as a group.  We took notes on each document and found important facts and then used this information to start analyzing and drawing conclusions.  Analyzing documents is an important part of curating because in order to create an interesting and in depth museum exhibit, you must understand your documents and be able to make specific selections to include in your exhibit.  Our exhibit is about Child Labor, and is titled “Stolen Childhood.”  We read and analyzed six documents.  The first document was a picture of young children chained to a cart pulling heavy loads into a mine.  The second document was a photograph taken by Lewis Hine that depicted young laborers working in the Georgia Textile Mill.  The next document was titled “Bobbin Girls” and talked about girls’ jobs working on a Spinning Jenny.  The next document was another article, titled “Factory Act” and listed some of the Acts against child labor that were put into law during the Industrial Revolution.  The fifth document we analyzed was a chart that showed the starting working ages of children from the past.  The last document that we studied was another picture, this time by Hurrier Cobden, of children crawling in the mines.  After completing our analysis of all of our documents and writing up what we were going to include in our exhibit, my group designed our exhibit which we titled, “Stolen Childhood.” The exhibit depicts how children were affected by their workload not just physically, but also emotionally.  This made us realize that instead of doing traditional or typical activities during their childhood, children living in the Industrial Revolution had an extremely laborious and arduous early life.  Thus, their childhood was essentially “stolen.”  I hope that when visitors come to our museum exhibit, they will see that to work and maintain these new innovative machines in the mills and factories, young helpers had to work tiresome hours which led them to be negatively affected by this severe treatment.

The first exhibit that I went that the other groups curated was titled, “Tearing Down Families.”  This title really made me realize that not everything coming out of the Industrial Revolution was positive.  For example, many machines produced materials much faster than ever before in the factories which were located in the cities causing families to have to move close to cities in order to earn money.  The next exhibit that I visited was title, “All Aboard.”  Without reading any of the information on the poster, I could already tell that this exhibit was about transportation, which is why “All Aboard” was a great title.  I was surprised to learn that although many citizens thought the invention of the railroad would revolutionize transportation, others thought that railroads would harm the world.  After the “All Aboard” exhibit, I then went to the exhibit called, “Progress has a Price.” Once again, the name of this exhibit really intrigued me because it shows that with the incredible progress that was made during the Industrial Revolution, there were also negative consequences.  One major consequence was that, even with all the new jobs available via the Revolution, people still didn’t have a lot of money to get buy easily in life.  The last exhibit that I visited on my tour was titled, “Behind the Scenes.” This title was well suited for this particular exhibit since it was about slavery.  As I read through this exhibit, I was surprised to learn that there was a rapid increase in slavery during the Industrial Revolution.  I really enjoyed looking at all of the exhibits.  Each exhibit seemed to speak to the positive and negative sides effects of the Industrial Revolution, which really made me question if it was all that “revolutionary.”