Museum Exhibits...Hung up in a High School?

Last week,  I spent most of my time in history class creating a "museum exhibit" about the Industrial Revolution.  To be a museum curator and create interesting exhibits, you must go through many different steps.  I learned that there are multiple steps needed to make an appealing poster.  To start off, my group had to analyze six different sources for our topic: the effect the Industrial Revolution had on the environment.  Next, we created a design for our poster exhibit that tied in to the theme, and printed out our sources and source descriptions.  After we glued the information onto our poster and wrote down a creative title, the exhibit was hung up in the school hallway.  Each of the five exhibits from my class was unique and talked about different contributions to the Industrial Revolution.

This is an image of the exhibit my group made in class.  It featured information on the environmental impact of the Industrial Revolution.

My poster was about the environment impact of the Industrial Revolution, but each other exhibit featured a different consequence from the same time period.  The first one I looked at was about child labor and was titled "Comdemning the Innocent."  The title helped me realize that child labor was a harmful consequence of the revolution, and that it was extremely unfair.  I learned that child labor was a big problem because the children were put to work at young ages, the the factory conditions were terrible.  It is depressing that the governments made children work like this, and 49.9% of them started before they were 10.  Lots of children got hurt during work, and some smaller ones had to dangerously crawl around mines.  The thought of child labor makes me sad, and I hope the government never invents a system this bad again.

The next poster, called "Spinning into Slavery," was about another unfair part of the revolution - slavery in the American South.  The title showed me that slaves were needed more frequently throughout the Industrial Revolution, and I learned that as the world became more industrialized, more slaves were required to complete the work needed to produce goods.  It is very sad that instead of having normal people do this work, they had slaves do all of it instead, but it is great that this problem has been fixed since then.  Different sources on this poster show that new machines, like the cotton manufacturer, were built, and the number of textile mills increased steadily during this time period.  The number of slaves went up because they were needed to operate these new machines.  Slavery and child labor were both faults of the revolution, but there were some pluses too.

The title of the exhibit "Spinning a City" told me that spinning was used all over the cities to make everyday things during this revolution.  I learned from the poster that many new inventions were created to increase the production of clothing, and the clothing industry grew rapidly as a result of this.  It is interesting how the populations of many cities, London especially, skyrocketed because of the increase in clothing.  The invention of the spinning loom was the most important invention because  it made the process of making clothing so much faster.  I learned that clothing is very important to a society, and because there were new and productive machines to increase clothing, there was also an increase in population.

The last poster from my history class was titled "Steam Powered Transportation: Now We're Getting Somewhere."  This told me that steam powered vehicles made everything move a lot faster from one place to another during the Industrial Revolution.  Traveling with steam power, especially by train, made everyone more productive in everything they did because they could move around faster instead of traveling by horse and carriage.  It it very interesting that the invention of steam power increased movement of people and helped them travel to less populated areas in America with ease.  For the exhibit, I learned that many people enjoyed traveling faster, and even more productive methods of traveling have bee invented since then.  During the early 1800s the production of the Erie Canal enabled citizens to travel over 363 miles faster.  These canals always connected cities, which wee the most common travel destinations.  Each aspect of the the Industrial Revolution was unique, and each were explained well on the posters we made in class.