This book contains an extensive treatise arguing that the Catawba, Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw and Chickasaw people of North America were descended from the Jews of the Bible. Such theories were a way for Europeans to try to understand the complex Indigenous societies that they encountered as they began to settle in the region. The idea first originated from passages by the sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler of Mexico, Bartolome de las Casas, but by the mid-seventeenth century, it was being expanded upon by English writers who saw parallels between Biblical Jewish customs and those of the Indigenous communities they had begun to encounter in North America.

Originating in Ireland, the author of this work, James Adair, spent some time living with Chickasaw and Cherokee communities, gaining a unique insight into their customs and their relationships with English-speaking traders in the American colonies. Despite the issues surrounding his theory of the origins of Indigenous North Americans, the book contains a useful history of the relationships between Native American communities and European traders.

The History was published in London in 1775 following many additions and several decades of work by Adair. Yet, the ongoing crisis between Britain and its American colonies, and a poor reception in London, led to the work being almost forgotten in its time, only recently becoming useful for historians interested in colonial relationships in eighteenth-century North America.