This dissertation examines elite and popular consciousness among Czech speakers in America during their mass migration from Bohemia and Moravia, the two Habsburg crownlands that became the largest part of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. Between 1860 and 1910, their numbers increased tenfold to almost a quarter-million, as recorded in the United States census, and to over a half-million with their children. That was almost one-twelfth of their population in Bohemia and Moravia. In the same half-century, a stable group of men made Czech-language journalism and publishing in America. They included Karel Jonáš in Wisconsin, Václav Šnajdr in Cleveland, František Boleslav Zdrůbek and August Geringer in Chicago, and Jan Rosický in Omaha.

Students of the first Czech-language secondary schools in Bohemia, they came to the 1860s American Midwest in their twenties and modernized a print culture launched by bricklayers and tailors. They also became leading voices in what the subtitle calls contention and brotherhood among their countrymen. Contention formed the three large camps, subcultures and allegiances—liberal/Freethinker, Catholic and Socialist. Brotherhood denotes the forms of association and security that made the fraternal benefit societies the largest and most durable platforms for Bohemian identity and advocacy in America. The dissertation uses Czech-American newspapers from the period, historiography and new archival sources from both sides of the Atlantic to more closely examine definitive episodes, personalities and institutions among Bohemians while they formed important urban and rural communities in American society from New York to the Great Plains.