Edward Gibbon

Cancale and Locmariaquer are dots on the Atlantic coast of France. Also places that produce my favorite food: Brittany oysters. Served raw on the half shell, with no more sauce than a squeeze of lemon, they are generally smaller than other varieties but...

Shippensburg University sent 1,095 newly minted college graduates out into the world at its undergraduate commencement Saturday before a packed crowd of parents, grandparents, siblings and friends at Seth Grove Stadium. “I’m so proud of him,&...

Herman Melville proves among the most-valued authors sold by AbeBooks in 2010....

It's Joseph Wambaugh's world. Other crime writers just live in it. Beginning with his 1971 novel, "The New Centurions," and his 1973 nonfiction masterpiece, "The Onion Field," the former Los Angeles Police Department detective all but created the...

Once upon a time, travel was heroic. Stepping outside your home meant drifting with Huck and Jim down the Mississippi south of Cairo. It meant burning and bopping and struggling along with Dean Moriarty in the old car south of Abilene, or dreaming with...

By birth, by foot, by automobile, from other states and other countries, legally and illegally, people have arrived in California for decades in unrelenting swells, human surf breaking steadily on a vast shore. Occasionally a big set rolls in and harasses...

The 18th-century British historian Edward Gibbon had no doubt that the victory of French leader Charles “The Hammer” Martel over Muslim armies in France in 732 A.D. had changed the course of world history. In his “The Decline and Fall of the Roman...

Gasping for breath in the thin Alpine air, we peered into the thick veils of clouds, desperate for a glimpse of the Italian plains stretching somewhere below. Above us, Monte Viso, the 12,600-foot, twin-peaked colossus of the southern French Alps,...

A Christmas Story Forty-one years ago a young attorney named Patrick J. Cooney came to Calexio from Chicago. One of his first clients was Jimmy Wong, who had 5,000 acres in cotton on the Mexican side of the border. He shipped his valuable crop into the...

A landslide closes the Hill Street tunnel, which was demolished when the “nose� of Bunker Hill was removed in June 1955. June 13, 1910: Police find that the athletic burglar who was caught the other day has refined tastes in reading. No funny papers...