The Western Heritage

The Western Heritage is an American history textbook used for the study of Western civilization and European history. It was published in 1979, and has gone through ten editions. It was written by Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, and Frank M. Turner. It soon became a "standard survey text" and is published in two volumes.

Considered conservative and old-fashioned when it was published, reviewers chided it for ignoring the Byzantines and Ottomans as well as giving short shrift to Russia and Poland. Others indicated lack of attention to the role of the Islamic states and ignorance of Islamic sources. It "could be plausibly described as consistently following something close to a biblical-literalist line" on the history of Ancient Israel.