Becoming a Museum Curator

During the past few classes, we've had the opportunity to become like a museum curator by being given information about the Industrial Revolution, and then having a to research, organize, and make an eye-catching display about our topic.  My group was given many different articles and sources about the transportation at the time of the Industrial Revolution, and had to arrange them in a certain way.  Our group decided to organize them chronologically, in order of which inventions came first, and which were most important at what times.  We started with a general timeline regarding transportation and the evolution of it, then moved on to information about the canals in Britain, followed by information about  the steam engine, railroads, and the controversy over the building of railroads, finally ending with the invention of the steam boat.  We also made the theme of the display about Thomas the Tank Engine from childhood books and television, because it connected directly to the theme of transportation and the steam engine, and also would interest young children if we were creating the display for a real museum.  We thought that it was very important for visitors to take away the idea of the evolution of transportation and how much it changed over time and improved in such a small amount of time, which is why we started off with a general overview of the changes in transportation, and went in order from the earlier inventions to the later ones to show how much more advanced they got.

I learned many important pieces of information about different topics through observing and taking notes on all of the other groups' displays.  Based on the "Spinning Wheels to Power Looms" poster, I learned that people had looms in their own homes and made their own clothes before the power looms were created.  This must have really affected the local economy because people would have had to pay much more for clothes from factories than from creating them with their own materials.  From the "Living in Filth" poster, I not only learned that the factories were seriously polluting the cities in which they were located in, the people working in them were also paid far less than what they were supposed to.  This is extremely important in showing how hard it must have been to break the poverty cycle at that time because people couldn't make enough money to pay for their everyday necessities and still be able to save up money for the future and other purposes.  Based on the "Broken Children" poster, I learned that most parents refused to send their children to factories originally, but poverty forced parents to send their children there to work and make more money.  This shows just how desperate the families' situations must have been to make them send their children to such horrible and dangerous conditions.  Finally, I learned from the "More Cotton, More Slaves, Less Freedom" display, that after the textile industry took off, the rate of slavery climbed rapidly too.  This shows just how hard it was for the people in that time period to have a successful economy without increasing slavery because with more product produced, there was more work required to produce it.
As you can see, there were many ways in which the Industrial Revolution changed America a lot, in some situations for better, and in some, for worse.