In his poem Concord Hymn, Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated the beginning of the American Revolution, describing the first clashes between Patriot militias and British troops as “the shot heard round the world.” The proclaimed transnational impact of this world-historical event held particularly true for Latin America, where the 1776 Declaration of Independence was perceived as a guiding example by anti-colonial leaders such as Simón Bolívar, who, in his “Letter from Jamaica” (1815), celebrated the successful revolution as a liberation “from the shackles of oppression”, arguing that

In his poem Concord Hymn, Ralph Waldo Emerson commemorated the beginning of the American Revolution, describing the first clashes between Patriot militias and British troops as “the shot heard round the world.” The proclaimed transnational impact of this world-historical event held particularly true for Latin America, where the 1776 Declaration of Independence was perceived as a guiding example by anti-colonial leaders such as Simón Bolívar, who, in his “Letter from Jamaica” (1815), celebrated the successful revolution as a liberation “from the shackles of oppression”, arguing that