My experience as a museum curator

Our group's museum exhibit

       The first step in creating a museum exhibit is to analyze your sources. This is done by reading each of the sources and pulling out the necessary information. Also, we organized the documents so they would make sense when you looked at it. This is the most important part of creating the exhibit because it is where you create the basis of what you are going to share.  Our exhibit is showing how the cotton mills, although very prosperous were working because of slaves and child laborers. Our first picture shows the basis of the cotton industry, the water frame, a machine that was the most efficient to process cotton. our second station shows how the cotton industry was global, by illustrating where it was imported and exported to. Then our third part was a picture of the Boott mill in Lowell, showing the infrastructure of the cotton industry. Next we had a graph showing how many slaves there were in certain Southern states between 1770-1860. After is a propaganda picture showing how the slaves did all the work and the rich got richer. Finally, is a chart showing the cotton production in Lowell and the U.S. slave population. Our title describes how the industrial revolution brought about amazing technological advances but on the backs of slave labor and child workers. I hope people will realize that the Industrial revolution has a dark side that cant be ignored.

Looking at group A's exhibit I saw a lot of pictures about the technical part of the cotton mills. They showed mainly the machines that evolved to become what was in the mills, the spinning wheel, the Spinning  Jenny and the mechanized loom.

Group B's poster displayed how the steam engine changed our whole transportation system. The steam engine was used to create the train, which was instrumental in creating connections in industrialized countries.

Group C's exhibit showed how the Revolution was very good and very bad. They showed peoples views and observations on the revolution and showed what it did to cities such as London.

Finally, at group D's station, I witnessed how child labor powered the revolution. They showed the awful, overcrowded factories they worked in and their long work hours.