What Can the Viewer Take Away?

This week in class we played the roles of museum curators and we built our own exhibits from a time in the Industrial Revolution.

The first thing that we had to do as museum curators is analyze your specific documents and pictures. This is important because you have to make sure that the sources are reliable and try to figure out what the author of either a document or picture wants the viewer to take away from it. My group's exhibit was all about child labour and the harsh working and living conditions. We had two different documents, one was "Bobbin Girls, 1794" and the other one was "The Factory Act, 1833." The "Bobbin Girls,1794" document is all about how the author doesn't think it is right to send their girls away at such a young age, but their parents have no choice but to send them away because they don't have enough money. "The Factory Act" lists many strict rules for the young children who work in the mills by restricting who can work there and for how long. We also had many pictures depicting the harsh treatment at the factories. One pictures is a picture of children in a coal mine in 1853, this picture shows the harsh conditions in the coal mines/factories and what the children have to do. Another picture is a picture of a child crawling through the mines dragging a cart filled with rocks, at the bottom of the picture it says, “Children had leather belts slung around them with a chain attached so that they could pull loads.” There was also a chart that shows the age distribution from 1818-1819 to the present, it shows how most kids started working at the age of 10 back then but now most people start working at the age of 21. The last picture we have its a pictures of young kids working at the Georgia textile mills in 1909, it shows how the kids are so small and can’t reach the top so they have to stand on top of the machines which can be potentially dangerous. The title of the exhibit is “Is the Pain worth the Gain?”, this is saying that is harming young children really worth getting the work done. I hope that when people see our exhibit they realize how bad child labour really was and how common it was.

Here is a picture of our exhibit:

There were also many other very good exhibits. One of the exhibits was called Making Money, Destroying Neighborhoods, this title is very intriguing and it made me wonder why people were destroying neighborhoods. This exhibit was mainly about the new machines that were being built and how it was effecting the environment, what shocked me the most was a picture of buildings on both sides of a river with a lot of smoke coming out of it; the water looked very dirty and polluted, I’m surprised that the people didn’t realize what they were doing to the earth.

This is the picture that shows the buildings on each side of the river polluting the river and air:

The second exhibit that I saw was one about the steam engine, the title of this exhibit is “America Runs on Steam Engine”; this is another intriguing title, it made me want learn more about the steam engine. Something interesting I learned from this exhibit is that the major product that were produced from the steam engine are coal, metal goods and woolen cloth and how these navigation routes helped other countries trade with each other. Another exhibit that I looked at was mainly about slavery, the title of this exhibit is called “Prosperity at the Cost of People”, when I saw this title instantly I thought of slavery because slave owners payed to have a slave. Something that I thought was really interesting how it says that in the past 90 years the amount of slaves has increased drastically and how there was a higher demand of slaves than there was cotton, because I know how important cotton.  The last exhibit that I looked at was all about the spinning machines and how it effected life during the Industrial Revolution, the title of this exhibit it “Just Keep Spinning”, this is based off of Dory from finding Nemo when she says “just keep swimming, which I think is a really good word play and it made me want to read more about the spinning machines. Something interesting that I learned was that children at the age of five could run the wheel to the machine, it was a good job for them because it was constant and it kept the children standing straight up so it won’t affect their growth.