On July 4th, 1837, the townspeople of Concord, Massachusetts first heard the lyrics of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” which was read and then sung (to the tune of the widely known hymn referred to as the “Doxology”) before a recently completed obelisk monument to the battles of Lexington and Concord. This, then, was the debut of Emerson’s famous description of these battles as “the shot heard round the world.” The historiography of the American Revolution has, ever since, been marked by tension between the intensely local and the global contexts of the war–with a fair amount of Christian eschatological Read more