New Worlds has significance for the religious and philosophical beliefs of diverse modern groups. This is perhaps most obvious when one considers the Mormons, since The Book of Mormon relates the story of a group of Israelites who were blown across the Atlantic to the New World in about 800 B.C. and who intermarried with and/or founded several native American tribes. The historicity of The Book of Mormon is an issue unto itself, to be sure, but there are other groups in America who hold roughly similar beliefs about relationships between native Americans and various Old World peoples, especially the Israelites and the Celts. Here again native American political sensibilities are involved, especially since Mormons, believing that they are historically directly related to native Americans, were once preferentilly used as tools of a racist Federal policy that attempted to eradicate native American culture by placing native American children in Mormon foster homes.
The difficulty for the historian in dealing with such beliefs is not that they are inherently impro
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