Please Touch Museum

     This is a picture of the model in the Centennial Exhibition Fair area of the Please Touch Museum. It was built in 1889 and moved into the building that the Please Touch Museum is housed in (which originally was one of the buildings in 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition Fair. John Barr, who was a Philadelphia businessman and was on the Centennial Exhibition Fair Finance Committee commissioned it. It was made by students, architects, and engineers who created it out of marble, plaster, wood, metal, and isinglass. This model is now enclosed in a wood and glass case. It is on display because the Please Touch Museum is housed in one of the Centennial Exhibition Fair buildings and it wants to acknowledge the building's history.
     This model is interesting and model-makers and also important for historians, especially those who are interested in American and/or 19th century history, but not for anybody else. The point of view of the text is descriptive though it is in a language so that even children could understand it. There are no other objects that are nearby the model except for various activities for children to do that relate to the model itself. These activities include: viewing pictures through a stereoscope; can fill a plate each with breakfast, lunch, and dinner; learning what foods were new at the Fair by putting cut out pieces into the spaces provided; pictures of soda, soda fountains, and popcorn; a Centennial banner; objects from the Fair; seeing "History Through a Window" in which children can learn about a nine-year-old girl named Daisy who went to the Fair; a man selling his popcorn, root beer, ice cream, and ice cream sodas by shouting it; laminated ephemera from the Fair; an area where children can experience the Froebel System of Kindergarten; can see Lincoln Logs; and an area devoted to the train in which children can pretend to be behind the Information desk, play with Bruno blocks, shovel coal, pull the train bell, and hang up signs on the old-fashioned wooden Amtrak arrival and departure sign.
     An opposing point of view would be the view from people of color. How did they view the Fair in those days? In addition, that would be an field of study that I could explore, in addition to researching how the Fair impacted not only Philadelphia, but also the United States and the world. I could engage visitors with the model by having modern-day pictures of where the buildings were and asking visitors to try and figure out with the help of the model which building goes in which picture.