Break The Siege

Construct an arsenal of mini-models of large launchers, based on siege weapons used throughout history. All you need are everyday items and some adult help. Wheel them out as you conduct a siege and load your catapults with raisins or marshmallows. Bite-sized facts explain how these siege weapons were used in history too!

The People's Front in Defense of Land of Atenco (the "Frente") is an emblematic force in contemporary Mexican politics and in anti-capitalist, anti-neoliberal activist networks throughout the world. Best known for years of resistance against the encroachment of a government airport project on communal farmland, the Frente also became international news when its members were subject to state violence, rape, and intimidation in a brutal government crackdown in 2006. Through it all, documentary filmmaking has been one aspect of the Frente and its allies' efforts. The contradictions and difficulties of this moral and political project emerge in the day-to-day experiences of local, national, and international filmmakers and film distributors seeking to participate in the social movement. Stone highlights the importance of how the circulation of the physical videos, and not just their content, promotes the social movement. More broadly she shows how videographers perform their activism, navigating the tensions between neoliberal personhood or ego and an ethos of compañerismo that privileges community. Grounded in the lived experiences of Atenco's activists and allied filmmakers, Atenco Lives! documents the making and circulating of films as an ethical and political practice purposefully used to transform human relationships.

Adjusting the Lens offers a detailed analysis of contemporary, independent, indigenous-language audiovisual production in Mexico and in Mexican migrant communities in the United States. The contributors relate the styles and forms of collaborative and community media production to socially critical, transformative, resistant, and constitutive processes off-screen, thereby exploring the political within the context of the media. The chapters show how diasporic media makers map novel interpretations of image and sound into existing audiovisual discourses to communicate social and cultural changes within their communities that counter stereotypical representations in commercial television and cinema, and contribute to a newfound communal identity. The new media expose the conflict of social movements and/or indigenous and rural communities with the state, challenge Eurocentrism and globalization, and reveal the power of audiovisual production to affect political change.

Under the crushing weight of the siege of Gaza, Laila and Nasser are members of the Palestinian resistance fighting desperately to free their people. Together, they learn of a plan to unite the disparate Palestinian factions and break Israel’s siege. Unknown to them, Ari, a brilliant Israeli spy, has decided that his conscience can no longer allow him to participate in the starvation of Gaza. A double agent whose every move is under mounting suspicion, Ari reaches out to the American contractors who trained him with a secret plan. As they all struggle to break the siege, they face the wrath of the Israeli military machine.

Since its inception in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), also known as the Jamaat-ul-Dawa (JuD), has arguably been the most threatening and disruptive terrorist organization in South Asia and beyond. While there is considerable scholarship on its history and operations, few scholars have exploited the organization's vast publications. This volume is the first scholarly effort to curate a sample of LeT's Urdu-language publications and then translate them into English for the scholarly community studying this group and related organizations. While the original texts were written and published by Dar al Andalus, which exclusively publishes LeT's books, pamphlets, posters, speeches, and other materials with the explicit intention of diffusing the group's ideology, raising funds, and cultivating volunteers for the organization, the authors hope that by rendering the group's materials more accessible, this book can contribute to the myriad efforts to combat such groups and the violence they perpetrate.

Choose your own learning adventure with Curiositree, a new series of visually compelling information charts. Discover the myriad reasons why humans have become the most successful species on the planet in this fascinating complete visual history of mankind. Travel from our earliest beginnings to the modern day, and discover how our evolution is interconnected by following the arrows that link to charts on related topics throughout the book. Exploring the development of farming, the origins of writing, religion, trade, weapons and armor, the first cities, and the growth of technology in the modern age, this visual compendium of wonders from the mind of man is full of fascinating information for curious young readers.

David Parrott's book offers a major re-evaluation of the last year of the Fronde - the political upheaval between 1648 and 1652 - in the making of seventeenth-century France. In late December 1651, Cardinal Mazarin defied the order for his perpetual banishment, and re-entered France at the head of an army. The political and military crisis that followed convulsed the nation, and revived the ebbing fortunes of a revolt led by the cousin of the young Louis XIV, the prince de Cond�. The study follows in detail the unfolding political and military events of this year, showing how military success and failure swung between the two sides through the campaign, driving both cardinal and prince into a progressive intensification of the conflict, while simultaneously fuelling a quest for compromise and settlement which nonetheless eluded all the negotiators' efforts. The consequences were devastating for France, as civil war smashed into a fragile ecosystem that was already reeling under the impact of the global cooling of the 'Little Ice Age'. 1652 raises questions about established interpretations of French state-building, the rule of cardinal Mazarin and his predecessor, Richelieu, and their contribution to creating the 'absolutism' of Louis XIV.