How to Curate a Museum

Group B's exhibit.

The aim of our exhibit was to educate others on how steam powered transportation progressed during the Industrial Revolution. We started by analyzing all our sources one by one, filling out the chart and asking sourcing questions. This is important because when you analyze the sources, it gives you a good idea of which are the most relevant, and what order to put them in that will be the most interesting and have the most logical progression. Then we split up work on the exhibit itself, between preparing the sources to be mounted, creating captions for them, and creating a layout/design/theme. We wanted the title to be clever, but also informative, and so we came up with “Steam-powered Transportation: Now We’re Getting Somewhere!” However, we realized that the paper didn’t have enough space for everything we wanted with the current layout, so we had to scrap the whole thing and redo it, but I think it turned out just fine anyways. The exhibit consists of six sources. The first is a diagram of how exactly a steam engine works, with an explanatory caption supplementing the diagram. The second is excerpts from letters by Robert Fulton, who steered the first steamboat. Third, there is a pair of pieces of writing side by side: one a poem from William Wordsworth arguing against the railroad, and one an informative piece by Samuel Smiles in support of it. There is also a piece of art by James C. Bourne, a depiction of a railroad, and a map of coal and metal production in Great Britain. The final source is a timeline of transportation in America from 1804-1853, which we wound around all the other sources and connected with a train track.

Group A’s exhibit, “Spinning a City,” was about the evolution of the loom. The Industrial Revolution consisted of multiple leaps in weaving technology, like the spinning jenny in 1764, followed by the British handloom in 1771. The exhibit at Group C, “Pollution in the Revolution,” talked a little about some of the negative indirect consequences of the revolution. One professor, Michael Faraday, dropped a strip of paper in the murky waters of a river, and it hadn’t sunk very far before it was completely obscured by the pollutants in the river. Exhibit D, “Condemning the Innocent: Child Labor,” informed about some of the younger constituents of the textile mill workforce. Interestingly, before industrialization, the most popular age group for working was 10 and under, but after, it became 21+. The last exhibit by Group E, “Spinning into Slavery,” explored the role of slavery in the Industrial Revolution. For example, high textile production rates in the North caused slaves picking cotton in the South to have to work harder to keep up the pace.

I appreciated this project for its creative aspects. I found it almost similar to a DBQ, with document analysis, just in a different format. This was enjoyable, and I hope we do something like this again in the future with other topics.