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Gilded Age cities offered extraordinary opportunities to women--but at a price. As clerks, factory hands, and professionals flocked downtown to earn a living, they alarmed social critics and city fathers, who warned that self-supporting women were just steps away from becoming prostitutes. With in-depth research possible only in a mid-sized city, Sharon E. Wood focuses on Davenport, Iowa, to explore the lives of working women and the prostitutes who shared their neighborhoods. The single, self-supporting women who migrated to Davenport in the years following the Civil War saw paid labor as the foundation of citizenship. They took up the tools of public and political life to assert the respectability of paid employment and to confront the demon of prostitution. Wood offers cradle-to-grave portraits of individual girls and women--both prostitutes and "respectable" white workers--seeking to reshape their city and expand women's opportunities. As Wood demonstrates, however, their efforts to rewrite the sexual politics of the streets met powerful resistance at every turn from men defending their political rights and sexual power.

"Labyrinth of Enlightenment" is a collection of poems reflecting our experiences as we awaken to our innate Divinity. This realization is usually initiated with the dissatisfaction of our outer world and a yearning for something beyond the empty busyness of our current daily lives.The passage of enlightenment unfolds much like a labyrinth. It is a sacred soul journey weaving its way from our outwardly projected human persona toward the heart of our Inner Being. It is a path of awakening, self-discovery, healing, and transformation. By going inward, consciousness reveals itself to us with the realization that our Divinity has always been present awaiting our awareness.This divine design is the Soul's loving way of guiding us through our many layers of healing as we weave all our broken or forgotten parts into wholeness and complete embodiment to live our lives in grace.May the words in these poems guide you to your own Inner Voice as you traverse your labyrinth of enlightenment. Trust that it will always lead you more deeply into the heart of your soul expanding your consciousness with newly realized wisdom to live your dreams and engage in the world as the Embodiment of the Divine.

How many incarnations we have had accumulating all the wisdom of many lifetimes! Yet, each time we incarnate, we enter the realm of forgetfulness with the illusion that this is a brand new lifetime for the human, thinking each lifetime is a learning experience, each lifetime a struggle of survival. Until THIS lifetime, the lifetime in which we have chosen to Awaken from the hypnosis of forgetfulness to remember the totality of Who We Are as glorious universal beings emerging as multidimensional humans ushering in an era of creative expression beyond our human imagination for this planet and all of humanity. An ancient dream is emanating from within us awakening humanity from our hypnosis singing us into a new existence with our Soul as a new way of being in resonance and fluidity with our Divinity. The "Emergence of the Dream" invites us to surrender our antiquated ways of living and open to the infinite potentials of our sacred dream of heaven on earth that we seeded eons ago to emerge and blossom as a new reality for all of humanity.

Our deepest passion for this lifetime is Soul Embodiment. Your Soul has been patiently waiting for you to realize its existence and allow yourself to expand beyond the antiquated limitations of the human mind. Whereas the human is in constant survival mode in search of its life purpose, the passion of the Soul is simply to experience the fullness of life as your GodSelf, as the I AM. The soul's desire is to experience just for the sake of experiencing It has no need to validate itself for it is already complete in the knowing that it exists The soul takes everything the human experiences distills it into its pure wisdom drinks it all in and falls more deeply in love with itself again and again with every new experience The true passion of the Soul is to simply experience the eternal fullness and joy of life. Your Soul wants to reclaim the divine essence of your true passion by diving deeply, feeling intensely, and tasting every nuance. Your Soul wants to experience your cherished treasures, plunge into joy, shiver with delight, and giggle with childish glee. The Soul revels in our expansion and enlightenment. The Soul loves to play, sing, dance, express and create. These are the joyous etudes of the Song of the Soul as our natural and unique way of being. I invite you to embrace your Soul Passion to live the totality of your true Self by expressing the pure joy of life in your own unique way as the divine purpose of your existence.

In 1990, the National Education Goals were established by the President and the 50 state governors. Great attention has been given to Goal 1, dubbed the "readiness" goal: By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn. The Goal 1 Resource Technical Planning Groups were asked to suggest ways in which Goal 1 could be measured. The purpose of this document is to further amplify the dimensions of early learning and development used by the National Educational Goals Panel to measure progress toward Goal 1. The following five dimensions are discussed: (1) "Physical Well-Being and Motor Development"; (2) "Social and Emotional Development," serving as the foundation for relationships which give meaning to school experience; (3) "Approaches toward Learning," referring to the inclinations, dispositions, or styles that reflect ways children become involved with learning; (4) "Language Development"; and (5) "Cognition and General Knowledge." For each of the dimensions, a rationale; general definition; the relationship to individual, cultural, and contextual variation; and a summary are given. The report concludes with a discussion of underlying issues, implications, and action steps. (Contains 83 references.) (BGC)

We are so much more than we realize. As humans beings, we have been functioning within society's pre-programed human mind in a highly complicated world. Our human self has become preoccupied with the trials and tribulations of daily life in order to survive. There is little time to be still and quiet to reflect upon who we truly are.We have forgotten that we are God embodied in physical form, each in our own unique way of experiencing and expressing life. We have forgotten our spiritual greatness and the embodiment of our wisdom as the Divine within us.Religion has gone to great lengths to separate us from God by giving "him" a separate persona outside of ourselves as a masculine god. A judgmental god that lives far off in the heavens with angels as his messengers and leaders of the church as his go-between. As a result of being referred to as children of God, we have forsaken our sovereignty. We judge ourselves so harshly we feel totally unworthy of Love or that we could possibly be the embodiment of God. And yet, this is the truth of who we are and have always been. There is no mystery, there are no teachings required, and it takes no effort. It is quite simple. When we approach life as heart-centered, our Self-knowing presents itself. With every action, God is revealing Itself to us, as us. It is in each of these moments, by remembering the totality of Who We Are as Divine Humans, that we find the love and peace that surpasses our human understanding.I invite you to take a few moments each day to be still and quiet, allowing these words of poetry to illuminate the truth of who you are as a Divine Human and the realization of your GodSelf in physical form.

Simultaneously, expenditures on human services have soared to record levels, further spurring both concerns and efforts to reform and better integrate a sadly dysfunctional system.

This book charts the changing complexion of American culture in one of the most culturally vibrant of twentieth-century decades. It provides a vivid account of the major cultural forms of 1960s America - music and performance; film and television; fiction and poetry; art and photography - as well as influential texts, trends and figures of the decade: from Norman Mailer to Susan Sontag; from Muhammad Ali's anti-war protests to Tom Lehrer's stand-up comedy; from Bob Dylan to Rachel Carson; and from Pop Art to photojournalism. A chapter on new social movements demonstrates that a current of conservatism runs through even the most revolutionary movements of the 1960s and the book as a whole looks to the West and especially to the South in the making of the sixties as myth and as history.