Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) was an English historian and politician. His
magnum opus
is his
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, originally published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789. It is one of the first modern analyses of Roman history using original sources, one of the first Roman histories to continue through the fall of the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire, and notorious for its anti-Christian bias. Although it has been superseded by later historians, the
The Decline and Fall
remains significant because of Gibbon's readable prose, his methodical ap- proach, and the scope of his work.
This book is in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonetic alphabet for writing English developed in the mid-19th century at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah).