The Big Picture

"Making Money Destroying Neighborhoods"

Recently in History class we, as groups, became experts on a certain topic of the Industrial Revolution and created our own museum exhibit to teach everyone about our subject. There are many pieces to putting together your own exhibit. First we all had to become experts on the topic we would be presenting, for us this consisted of analyzing documents to find information, but also analyzing the documents to find out about the author, and the time period. This then helped us to lead into what people would want to get out of our exhibit, so we then created captions for our documents to summarize the documents information. My group’s topic was the negative effects on the people and environment during the industrial revolution. This picture does not give a clear picture of my groups exhibit but I will explain the sources here. The first picture in the top left corner is called “View of Manchester” this picture gives us a visual of the polluted river, the document in our exhibit that goes hand in hand with this picture is “Observations on the Filth of the Thames” this letter was written by Professor Michael Faraday to the editor of the times of London. Professor Faraday told the times about the smell and discoloration of the liquid that was supposedly a river. The two documents outlined in purple both show how in certain years of the revolution the amount that most people were earning was not enough to keep up proper living conditions, in other words “Dudley Street” and “Evidence on the Standard of Living Debate in Great Britain” showed us how common poverty was. The last two documents in our exhibit “Differing Views of English Industrialization in the 1830s” and “Industry 1715-1815” show the two sides of the industrial revolution; they demonstrate the revolutionary inventions and amazing technological advances, but also show us the effect it is taking on the people and environment. Our title “Making Money, Destroying Neighborhoods” was created to really give the visitor an idea of what the exhibit is about, how the industrial revolution was hurting many people in order for success.

Besides my groups exhibit, I learned a lot about the other parts of the Industrial Revolution. “America Runs on the Steam Engine” was a very creative title that caught my eye. This title contributed to my understanding of the exhibit because it very clearly demonstrates that without the steam engine industrialization would have been much more difficult, with it trading with other places was made much more convenient. This exhibit shows the importance of metals and coals and without these, so many of our technological advances would have been impossible. The exhibit that was all about the different looms, I also found to be very interesting. The title “Just Keep Spinning” I thought was very clever and fitting to the exhibit. When reading this groups poster I learned that even when all these new technology pieces were being made and they were making life easier, some people saw them differently, for example one man was upset because these machines were doing human work, and then his wife and kids were being put out of work. Not to be forgotten though, the advances to the loom were very revolutionary. The loom went from being inefficient to becoming a very fast machine that could get work done. The exhibit on Slaves and mill owners I thought was very interesting, the title “Prosperity at the Cost of People” aids in my understanding because it shows how many people were being put to work just so one overarching power can make more money for himself. while reading this exhibit I learned that slaves were in very high command during the time period of the Industrial Revolution, they would pick cotton and because cotton was in such high demand that’s why slaves were. The last exhibit in my class is called “Is the Pain Worth the Gain” this title is asking us if putting your small children to work in terrible conditions really worth just getting the work done? In this exhibit I learned how terrible the working conditions were for the small children, they were as young as 10 when they were put to work.