Museum Curator

            This week in history class, we did an activity entitled “museum curator” in which several groups of students created posters concerning different aspects of the Industrial Revolution and put them on display for other students to learn and take notes from.

            The process of analyzing sources for the creation of our poster was not necessarily a difficult task, but it took time to analyze each source and take notes on them, and the analysis is a very important part of curating because one must know basic information on their subject before having to create a project on it. My group’s exhibit was about transportation during the Industrial Revolution, and our sources included a canal map of Great Britain in 1800, a picture of what it looks like cutting a railroad line, an excerpt from a man’s journal explaining his first experience on a steam boat, contrasting quotes on the coming of the railroad debate, a diagram showing how a steam engine would work in the 1800s, and a timeline of innovations in transportation during the Industrial Revolution. We titled our exhibit “All Aboard”. We titled it this to connect the many new innovations made during the Industrial Revolution and our subject, transportation. In coming to our exhibit, we hoped visitors would learn about the many inventions in transportation made during the Industrial 
Revolution.

            I learned many things when visiting other exhibits during this activity. The other subjects I learned about included child labor, living conditions in England during the Industrial Revolution, tools used during the Industrial Revolution, and cotton production. For child labor, I learned that children were torn from their families to work in factories, with terrible conditions. This is appallingly unjust and cruel towards the child workers, and does not set them up for a successful life. The living conditions in England during the Industrial Revolution were just as appalling as the child labor. During this time, rivers in London were nothing but a shallow, brown liquid. Tools used during the Industrial Revolution included many innovative items from the time. This included inventions
 such as the Almond Loom and the Spinning Jenny. Cotton production was an enormous innovation in the Industrial Revolution, and was one of the main sources of income. It was imported and exported to many places and was required almost everywhere.

            
          The Industrial Revolution was a very important time period in our history, and must not go 

unnoticed. Many of these innovations assisted in the moving forward in our history.