In 1893, Wellesley College teacher Katharine Lee Bates was so moved by the "purple mountain majesties" she witnessed from a summer picnic atop 14,115-foot Pike's Peak that she wrote a poem about it.

A mad scramble for space that's going to transform the entire country The United States of America, home of purple mountain majesties, amber waves of grain, and seas of shining … solar farms?

National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum Permanent Collection, 2019.30.33. Purple mountain majesties. Prisons far and wide. Mass incarceration is a feature in America the beautiful.