The "shot heard round the world" is a phrase referring to several historical
incidents, including the opening of the American Revolutionary War in 1775 and
the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1914.
Skirmish at the North Bridge The phrase is originally from the
opening stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Concord Hymn", and referred to the
first shot of the American Revolutionary War. According to Emerson's poem, this
pivotal shot occurred at the North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts, where
the first British soldiers killed in the battles of Lexington and Concord fell.
Historically, no single shot can be definitely cited as the first shot of
the battle or the war. Shots were fired earlier at Lexington, where eight
Americans were killed and a British soldier was slightly wounded, but
accounts of that event are confused and contradictory, and it has been
characterized as a massacre rather than a battle. The North Bridge skirmish did
see the first shots by Americans acting under orders, the first organized volley
by Americans, the first British fatalities, and the first British
retreat. The question of the point of origin of
the Revolutionary War has been debated between the towns of Lexington and
Concord and their partisans since at least 1824, when the Marquis de
Lafayette was welcomed to the "[B]irthplace of American liberty" at
Lexington, then informed in Concord that it was there that the "first forcible
resistance" was made. In 1875 President Grant almost avoided attending
centennial celebrations in the area to evade the issue, and in 1894 Lexington
petitioned the state legislature to proclaim April 19 as "Lexington Day", to
which Concord objected, leading to the current name of Patriots' Day for the
holiday. Emerson lived, at the time of the poem's
creation, in a house only about 90 metres from the North Bridge, from which
his grandfather and father had witnessed the skirmish.
Assassination of Franz Ferdinand In Europe and the Commonwealth of
Nations, the phrase "shot heard round the world" has become associated with
Serbian Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria
in Sarajevo, an event considered to be one of the immediate causes of World War
I. Princip fired two shots, the first
hitting Franz Ferdinand's wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, and the second
hitting the Archduke himself. The death of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the
Austro-Hungarian throne, propelled Austria-Hungary and the rest of Europe
into what was then known as the "Great War" and would eventually become known
as World War I. Thomson's home run
In American baseball, the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" denotes the
game-winning walk-off home run by New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson off
Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca at the Polo Grounds to win the National
League pennant at 3:58 p.m. EST on October 3, 1951. As a result of the
"shot", the Giants won the game 5-4, defeating their traditional rivals in
their pennant playoff series, 2 games to 1.
Widespread idiomatic use The phrase "Shot heard round the world"
continues to be a stock phrase in the 21st century, widely used to refer to
extraordinary events in general. The following sections list some examples of
this. = In sport =
The phrase has been applied to several dramatic moments in sports history.
In International Men's Ice Hockey, it refers to the winning goal of Paul
Henderson in the final seconds of the 8th and final match to secure Team
Canada's victory in the 1972 Canada-USSR Summit-series. The goal was made famous
by a Frank Lennon photograph. In 1980, it was used to refer to the game-winning
goal scored by U.S. Olympic team captain Mike Eruzione, putting the U.S. team in
the lead for good with 10:00 minutes remaining against the highly favored
Soviet Union Olympic team. In 1987, it referred to the game-winning goal scored
by Canada's Mario Lemieux with 1:26 remaining in the third and final game of
the Canada Cup finals versus the Soviet Union.
In National Hockey League, refers to the winning goal of Bobby Orr in the May 10,
1970 playoff game, when he scored one of the most famous goals in hockey history
and one that gave Boston its first Stanley Cup since 1941.
In golf, it is used most often to describe Gene Sarazen's albatross on the
fifteenth hole at the 1935 Masters Tournament, which helped propel him into
a 36-hole playoff with Craig Wood. Sarazen would win the playoff by five
strokes. In ice skating, "The Whack Heard Areound
the World" was used to describe the incident of sabotage involving Nancy
Kerrigan and Tonya Harding In college basketball, it refers to the
last second shot by Ernie Calverley of the University of Rhode Island against
Bowling Green State University which tied the 1946 National Invitation
Tournament quarterfinal game and sent it into overtime. Rhode Island went on to
win the game 82-79. In U.S. soccer, it is used to describe
the goal scored by Paul Caligiuri for the United States against Trinidad and
Tobago in Port of Spain in 1989. The win propelled the team to the 1990 FIFA
World Cup, helping to start a resurgence of American soccer, which has seen the
U.S. appear in every World Cup since that time, including its hosting of the
1994 World Cup, which in turn led to the creation of Major League Soccer.
= In popular culture = Schoolhouse Rock! used "Shot Heard Round
the World" as the title for their episode describing the American
Revolution. "Seconds" by Human League uses the
phrase as a refrain. The phrase is part of the chorus in the
song "One Girl Revolution" by Superchick.
Various sources have made the play-on-words "herd shot 'round the
world" in reference to rocketry and cows.
In the 2006 film Delirious the phrase is used by a Hollywood talk show host as a
description of a photo taken by one of the film's main characters.
On the 2009 album Love Drunk by the pop-rock band Boys Like Girls one of the
tracks is titled "The Shot Heard 'Round The World".
The 1986 album Bedtime for Democracy by the band Dead Kennedys contained a song
called "Potshot heard around the world" which discussed the 1983 Beirut barracks
bombing. The 1986 hit single "Yankee Rose" by Van
Halen singer and frontman David Lee Roth features the phrase in its first verse.
= In media = During the 2009 swine flu outbreak The
New York Times referred to 'patient zero', a 5-year-old Mexican boy named
Édgar Hernández, as the source of "Coughs Heard Round the World."
In 2006, the phrase was used by Newsweek in describing then-Vice President Dick
Cheney's accidental shooting of Harry Whittington while quail hunting in
Texas. In a December 2010 article in The New
York Times, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow described the unprecedented
online activism in support of Julian Assange by the collective Anonymous
during Operation Payback as "the shot heard round the world — this is
Lexington." In 2013, by Candy Spelling to refer to
the shooting of Malala Yousafzai. References