The Shot Heard 'Round the World

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard 'round the world."

This is a quote from the opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn" (1837). It referred to the beginning of the American Revolutionary War.

On the night of April 18, 1775, General Gage sent 700 men to seize munitions stored by the colonial militia at Concord, Massachusetts. Riders including Paul Revere alerted the countryside, and when British troops entered Lexington on the morning of April 19, they found 77 minutemen formed up on the village green. Shots were exchanged, killing several minutemen. The British moved on to Concord, where a detachment of three companies was engaged and routed at the North Bridge by a force of 500 minutemen. As the British retreated back to Boston, thousands of militiamen attacked them along the roads, inflicting great damage before timely British reinforcements prevented a total disaster. With the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the war had begun.

Emerson's poem aptly described another shot heard 'round the world.


On June 28, 1914 a shot was fired in Sarajevo that triggered World War 1. Gavrilo Princip, only nineteen years of age, murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his pregnant wife. Gavrilo was a member of THE BLACK Hand.

Will the words of this poem once again echo across the world?