Congress of Vienna

In class, we learned about an important event that took place after the Napoleonic reign known as the Congress of Vienna.  We also discussed what people who are in power do when their power is threatened, and how they will try to retain their power. In class, we did an activator that represented the views of each country, and how they all are fighting for more power and land when splitting up the land Napoleon claimed for France.  This showed us that the power of each country was determined by the amount of territory that they had, and how each one of them wanted more than the others.  By having less land than others, they felt that their power was threatened, and that they needed to split it up evenly to prevent another Napoleonic reign.

After the downfall of Napoleon, each country had a different reaction.  These reactions included the Balance of Power, the Principle of Legitimacy, the Holy Alliance, and the Principle of Intervention.  Each one of these had different outcomes for certain situations, and were put in place to try to maintain peace between all of the countries and in all of them.  One of the principles that Metternich and other representatives used to eliminate threats to their power was the balancing of power.  The Balance of Power made sure that countries were able to defend themselves if something like the Napoleonic reign were to ever happen again, and it also prevented countries from becoming more powerful than the others.  This division of power made sure that one country, like France, could not become overwhelmingly powerful and take over the others like Napoleon tried to do.  The Congress of Vienna made it so that the land conquered by Napoleon was divided up equally between countries, and it made some smaller countries more powerful, while eliminating some city-states for this expansion.  This balance of power added control to the countries, and it granted many years of peace for everyone who was a part of this session.

I personally think that the major powers made the right choice by giving power to the lesser ones, making them major powers.  However, I feel that if they wanted to help more people they would have let Italy declare their independence, which would have prevented many revolutions there and allowed other countries to worry less about it.  I feel that the powerful should definitely be willing to sacrifice some of their power under certain circumstances because their sacrificing of power and land could mean peace for everybody.  If someone is to sacrifice land for the sake of another country due to a dispute between that country and another, it would bring a cease to the fighting going on between the two.  The country that was attacking another would get the land that they were fighting for, and the country that lost the land would be granted the land from another major country.  In order for there to be peace in the world, people need to make sacrifices. If major powers made these sacrifices for others, peace would spread across the world for everyone.

MOSI Blog Post

In preparation for our talk with Jamie, a mill curator in England, we did a few things to get out minds thinking. We drafted questions we would ask him and also watched one of his previous videos to give us a little bit of insight into what it is he does and what it means to be a proper museum curator.  We visited a website called http://worldhistory.abc-clio.com, and there we learned about how the mills operated and also what each machine did. We also discovered the evolution of these machines, and how one invention led to the creation of an even better one that served the same purpose but was far more efficient. Through watching the video and formulating our questions, we gained some background information on Jamie and his job, but we unveiled far more when we had the chat with him.

One of the first things we talked about was the textile process overall.  The textile business was a very dangerous one, and people were frequently getting hurt by the machines.  These machines were run primarily by women, and there were very poor working and living conditions. We also talked about the evolution of technology through the 1700s to the 1900s, such as the eventual evolution of the hand loom into the power loom.  As this technology progressed, machines got louder, nearly deafening many mill workers.  They also became more unsafe, leading to multiple injuries, but to the mill owners the only important part was the speeding up of production. The power loom was an example of this enhancement of machinery because it was invented to increase the overall production and speed of the textile process, as they could be lined up to create factories. All of these machines in one room created a large amount of noise, and more machines meant more chances that someone could get hurt.  However, the biggest impact the textile industry had was on the families of many people.  The industry allowed people from poor families to go to the city and work in a factory for a living.  They would be able to earn money to send back to their families, and they would be provided with food and shelter in boarding houses.  Even though they had some of these benefits, they each had a draw back to them.  People who worked in the mills were away from their families, and they were not paid well at all. They also had to deal with poorer living conditions as the industry progressed.  Their lives were quite miserable in the mills, with the long hours of work and little break time.  Not only did we learn about how the mills affected families, but we also got to talk to Jamie a little bit about his job as a curator.  He told us that his job involves the managing of the old machines, and also how he tries to teach people more about the textile industry in the industrial era. I didn't think that Jamie taught people about the machines, and I really didn't know what a curator did until we talked to him.  

Overall, I feel like I learned more from an outside expert than I would have by reading excerpts, and I think that it gave us a lot deeper of an understanding of the textile industry than reading about it did.  I enjoyed learning about it directly through someone whose life revolves around it, but there were a few things I didn’t like about it.  I didn't like how he could only see one or two of us at a time, and it was also hard to hear what he was saying sometimes.  Despite this, I would really like to do it again, as it allowed us to become more in depth with the concept by talking about it with an experienced person who knows more about it than many of us.  Watching Jamie talk to us about the textile industry was an experience that I would most definitely want to try again with other concepts, and I enjoyed being there.

Here's a Link to MOSI's Website!
http://www.mosi.org.uk/explore-mosi/explore-galleries/textiles-gallery.aspx

Here's one of the videos of our chat!