ABSTRACT
The homeland of Serbians in America is located in southeastern Europe between BosniaHerzegovina and Albania, although most Serbian Americans draw their immigrant roots not to the Kingdom of Serbia but to Serbian settlements in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the northwest. Serbians share a language with Croatians to the northwest, and early immigrant organizations in
the United States often combined the two groups into a South Slavic union (along with Slovenians). However, political, literary, and religious differences (Croatians are mostly Roman Catholic and use the Latin alphabet, Slovenians are also Catholic but have their own language, while Serbians and Montenegrins align themselves with Eastern Orthodoxy and use the Cyrillic alphabet) into the twentieth century influenced the formation of separate ethnic identities. While neighboring Montenegro, with a coastline on the Adriatic Sea, has its own political identity, Serbia shares a common cultural and religious heritage with the Montenegrins; after the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991, in fact, Serbia and Montenegro formed a federation linking the two republics. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the region has been beset by war, ethnic violence, and economic crisis, pushing many residents to emigrate. The influx in the United States was especially heavy during the great wave of immigration from 1880 to 1920, when immigrant labor was sought in factories and steel mills of the industrializing Northeast and Midwest. At the start of the twenty-first century, almost half of all Serbs and Montenegrins lived outside Serbia proper, giving them a diasporic ethnic connection.
