Industrial Revolution

In January the older students started learning about the Industrial Revolution, which first took place in England and later in America. We soon learned how inventions (like the steam engine, cotton gin, spinning jenny, flying shuttle, railroad and model-T) ignited this revolution. America began to change from an agrarian society to an industrial society and factories sprouted up all over the country. Students were assigned to read books such as Factory Girls, Counting on Grace and Trouble in the Mines, which focused on the appalling conditions children, were subjected to in factories and how people like Lewis Hine and Mother Jones championed to protect them. After taking part in a simulation of the monotony and repetition of working on an assembly line we looked at films that showed how Henry Ford invented the assembly line. Later we will learn about the industrialists who amassed great fortunes and the birth of the labor movement.