Curator For a Day

 

     A curator is the person who is in charge of a particular collection in a cultural heritage institute, such as a museum. By doing this project, my group and I learned what it is like to be a museum curator and what steps you have to go through to put together an exhibit. 

     The first thing we had to do was analyze five sources that had to do with our topic, which was Slavery in the US, the Cotton Trade, and the Industrial Revolution. Our sources were a picture of the Lowell Mill town, a map of the British cotton trade, a graph of slavery population in different states in the US, a cartoon that illustrated how slavery increased industrialization, and a short reading on the inventions of Sir Richard Arkwright. My group came up with our exhibit title “Weaving Slavery into the Industrial Revolution” by trying to tie in the main ideas of all of the sources we used in creating our exhibit. 

     I hope that people visiting my group’s exhibit will learn that slavery played a huge role in the US during the Industrial Revolution. Slaves who worked in the cotton industries made cotton more accessible. So when there was a higher demand for cotton, it meant that the US needed more slaves to work in the industries, thus putting more slaves to work, causing the slave population to increase, which fueled the industrialization.

     When we walked around to look at exhibits put together by other groups in the class, I learned a lot of things about the different topics that I did not expect and did not know before. Looking at the exhibit about Child Labor, I learned that the Factory Act of 1833 decreased working hours for children under 18. It also stated that no children under the age of 9 were allowed to work in the factories because it was a dangerous environment to be subjected to. From another exhibit poster titled “Changes in Life Conditions due to the Industrial Revolution” I learned that if the Industrial Revolution never happened, factories and air pollution would be nonexistent. I also learned about Cartwright and his invention of the Power Loom in Manchester UK in 1785. Another exhibit titled “Fueling Transportation in the Industrial Revolution” I learned that railroads were created in the 1840’s-1850’s by Williams Wordsworth and Samuel Smiles. From the last exhibit I looked at called “A New Age is Looming over the Horizon” I learned that the British Handloom was created in 1771 by John Almond, and that looms were used by women in textile mills.

      From being a curator on a certain topic under the Industrial Revolution, I learned that t was easier for me to focus on one specific topic, rather than a few different ones all at once. But after looking around at other group’s exhibits, I ended up learning a lot about the other topics in the Industrial Revolution, and I was able to learn different things from my classmates, while teaching them what I learned at the same time.