ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the gradual elaboration and refinement of the embryonic notions of New World self-identity within American cultural identities. With similar transcendental hyperbole, the speeches of early American presidents evoked unspecified transcendental motifs to write a story of exceptional geopolitical difference. Transcendentalism became articulated through various territorial mythologies, wherein America was described as the 'Promised Land' or the 'New Israel'. Political and popular disseminations of the mythologies of American exceptionally across American practical and popular geopolitical practices and texts all promise an image of America as the transcendental state. One of the most compelling examples of the Rocky Mountain School's reading of the American West as a holy text, and by extension an emblem of American manifest destiny, was Moran's Mountain of the Holy Cross. The American Sublime was influenced by the European notions of the sublime popularized by Romantic writers and artists, and Enlightenment philosophers, notably Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant.
