Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel”—Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE—took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

Some white Protestants, Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people constructed nationalist narratives around the then-popul...