Broken Children

This past week my history class spent curating during our Industrial Revolution unit. For one week and one week only we, along with the members of our groups, slid into the shoes of museum curators. It was not as hard as I had expected it to be. The first day we examined our sources, two excerpts from primary documents, one chart of the age distribution of workers in a British factory, two drawings of children working in mines, all from the 19^th century and one photograph from an American factory in 1909. Then we took notes on author, date, reason for being created, and what the museum visitor should take away from our six sources. That first day also involved discovering our topic; ours was almost blatantly obvious, being six examples of child labor. The second day we spent creating captions and deciding we would order our sources chronologically. That class we also came up with our title. Our first idea was the ever boring “The History of Child Labor during the Industrial Revolution”, but then after a little prodding from Mrs. Gallagher we rethought it and came up with “Broken Children”. After looking at the finished product up on the wall, I hoped people reading it would walk away knowing more about child labor than when they came and that the design would prove beneficial.  

              The exhibits of my classmates were mostly on inventions during this time (it is not called the industrial revolution for nothing) like the steam engine, the water frame, and the flying shuttle. However, there were two other topics that like ours shined a light on the uglier side of the revolution, one on the filthy living conditions in England during the 1800s and one museum exhibit spoke of slavery during that time.