annual pagan pilgrimage with all its traditional rites into the new religion, is identified as a key moment in world history, in that it released the new faith from confinement in Medina and allowed it to spread within Arabia and beyond. --

When independent filmmakers, activists, and amateurs document the struggle for rights, representation, and revolution, they instrumentalize images by advocating for a particular outcome. Ryan Watson calls this "militant evidence." In Radical Documentary and Global Crises, Watson centers the discussion on extreme conflict, such as the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo. Under these conditions, artists and activists aspire to document, archive, witness, and testify. The result is a set of practices that turn documentary media toward a commitment to feature and privilege the media made by the people living through the terror. This footage is then combined with new digitally archived images, stories, and testimonials to impact specific social and political situations. Radical Documentary and Global Crises re-orients definitions of what a documentary is, how it functions, how it circulates, and how its effect is measured, arguing that militant evidence has the power to expose, to amass, and to adjudicate.

The theory of Permanent Revolution has been associated with Leon Trotsky for more than a century since the first Russian Revolution in 1905. Trotsky was the most brilliant proponent of Permanent Revolution but by no means its sole author. The documents in this volume, most of them translated into English for the first time, demonstrate that Trotsky was one of several participants in a debate from 1903-7 that involved numerous leading figures of Russian and European Marxism, including Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Parvus and David Ryazanov. This volume reassembles that debate, assesses it with reference to Marx and Engels, and provides new evidence for interpreting the formative years of Russian revolutionary Marxism.

For four bloody years, the Civil War ravaged America. Those at home could only imagine the sights and events overtaking their husbands and sons, fathers and brothers who were under arms. Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper was a primary source of information during those dark days. The reporters and artists who traveled with the armies were eyewitnesses to events, great and small, for their captivated readers. Sometimes the news was sensational. At other times it was tragic. But it was always eagerly sought after. Here are the accounts, in pictures and stories, of those first wartime journalists. Here are their reports from the front lines. Here is the Civil War's news as originally presented to loved ones at home. Here you will find images of the battles, the leaders, the camp life, and of the soldiers who gave their all for North and South. In your hands you hold the testimony of those who were Witness to the Civil War.

Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.

M. James Penton offers a comprehensive overview of a remarkable religious movement, from the Witnesses' inauspicious creation by a Pennsylvania preacher in the 1870s to its position as a religious sect with millions of followers world-wide. This second edition features an afterword by the author and an expanded bibliography.

A devastating crisis has the Jehovah's Witness religion facing extinction. Chances are that you have never met a real “Jehovah’s Witness.” While those at your door may claim to be one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, their own publications plainly teach otherwise. So, who are the real Jehovah’s Witnesses? The Watchtower Society teaches that they are members of the 144,000 who will be the only ones going to heaven. Membership in this group began with the early apostles. Over the centuries others have been added but the Watchtower declared that the number was completed in 1935. Anyone who claims to be one of Jehovah’s’ Witnesses has to be one of the 144,000 and must be very old now. However, the Watchtower Society teaches that these are the only ones who hear from God and are responsible for Watchtower teaching and leadership. Because these people are dying, the Watchtower is facing a credibility crisis. So, the Watchtower is quietly manipulating these death figures to keep the Watchtower organization alive! And now, just last year, Watchtower literature quietly began to try to wiggle out of the 1935 closing date for the 144,000. But this only adds further opportunity for you to show the “JW” who comes to your door that he cannot trust the Watchtower with his precious eternal life. The Watchtower representative at your door believes he will remain on “Paradise Earth” after the coming Armageddon, since only the original 144,000 have any hope of going to heaven. In fact, they are the only ones allowed to take communion. He does not believe he can understand Bible truths without the Watchtower. He is dependent on a publication that, one day soon, will be left without writers to reveal God’s truths. Who are those writers? Those who remain of the original 144,000 and they are dying! Oddly enough, their founder, Charles Taze Russell, never taught the doctrine of the 144,000. In this book, you will learn the true history of this false Watchtower doctrine. You will be surprised to discover that this doctrine is not just a Bible issue. It is also a historical issue and a numbers game that the Watchtower Society has had to manipulate throughout the years to keep that organization alive! With the information and witnessing strategies in this book, you will be able to plant seeds of doubt and undermine the authority of the Watchtower. The Watchtower knows it is essential that this cornerstone doctrine remain alive if it is going to continue to exist as the spiritual leader for its followers. Time is the enemy of this teaching and they know it.

What should Christian witness look like in our contemporary society? In this timely book, Alan Noble looks at our cultural moment, characterized by technological distraction and the growth of secularism, laying out individual, ecclesial, and cultural practices that disrupt our society's deep-rooted assumptions and point beyond them to the transcendent grace and beauty of Jesus.

Events in the Middle East have prompted many questions concerning the conflict between Islam and the European states which have, historically, been seen as a military and political challenge. Why has ideological politics triumphed in the Middle East? Why have attempts to form constitutional governments repeatedly failed in Islamic states? This new and authoritative account provides the historical analysis necessary for a clearer understanding of these questions.