Both first-hand experience from trips to America and mediated reports about the life and situation there led to the formation of an image in the collective imagination of Central Europeans that not necessarily matched with reality: it included highly idealised or stereotyped attitudes. Encounters with new experience, native nations, and an unusual environment led to the visualisation of America as a ‘wild continent’, but also a land of unlimited technological progress and unsuspected life opportunities in both positive and negative sense of the word.