Adair’s History of the American Indians is James Adair’s eighteenth-century account of the southeastern Indian nations among whom he lived and traded for many years, including the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek. Adair records their customs, languages, religion, government, and ways of war and peace in unusual detail.
Famous for its argument that the American Indians descended from the lost tribes of Israel, the book is best valued today for its rich firsthand ethnographic observations rather than that theory. As one of the earliest substantial sources on southeastern Native cultures, it is indispensable to historians and anthropologists, despite the biases of its author and era. It remains a foundational document of early American ethnology.