Star Trek and History

By Nancy R. Reagin

A guide to the history that informs the world of Star Trek?just in time for the next JJ Abrams Star Trek movie

For a series set in our future, Star Trek revisits the past constantly. Kirk and Spock battle Nazis, Roman gladiators, and witness the Great Depression. When they're not doubling back on their own earlier timelines, the crew uses the holodeck to spend time in the American Old West or Victorian England. Alien races have their own complex and fascinating histories, too.

The Star Trek universe is a sci-fi imagining of a future world that is rooted in our own human history. Gene Roddenberry created a television show with a new world and new rules in order to comment on social and political issues of the 1960s, from the Vietnam War and race relations to the war on terror and women's rights. Later Star Trek series and films also grapple with the issues of their own decades: HIV, ecological threats, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and terrorism.

How did Uhura spur real-life gender and racial change in the 1960s? Is Kirk inextricably linked with the mythical Old West? What history do the Klingons share with the Soviet Union? Can Nazi Germany shed light on the history and culture of the Cardassians? Star Trek and History explains how the holodeck is as much a source for entertainment as it is a historical teaching tool, how much of the technology we enjoy today had its conceptual roots in Star Trek, and how by looking at Norse mythology we can find our very own Q.

• Features an exclusive interview with Nichelle Nichols, the actress behind the original Lt. Uhura, conducted at the National Air and Space Museum
• Explains the historical inspiration behind many of the show's alien races and storylines
• Covers topics ranging from how stellar cartography dates back to Ancient Rome, Greece, and Babylonia to how our "Great Books" of western literature continue to be an important influence to Star Trek's characters of the future
• Includes a timeline comparing the stardates of Star Trek's timeline to our own real world history

Filled with fascinating historical comparisons, Star Trek and History is an essential companion for every Star Trek fan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Mar 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118239506

Book preview

Introduction

Time Warps and Future Histories

Nancy R. Reagin

Spock: Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a [historian] as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill’s, have made such a fatal error?

Kirk: He drew the wrong conclusion from history.

—TOS, Patterns of Force

James T. Kirk certainly knows his history—even better than his former history instructor at Starfleet Academy, Professor John Gill. In the original series episode Patterns of Force, Gill was rather naive about the consequences of introducing Nazi ideology into an alien culture. His re-creation of Nazi Germany on another planet almost leads to a new Holocaust, before Kirk and the Enterprise crew intervene and head off disaster.

For a film and TV franchise that ranges across many futures, Star Trek is very interested in the past. The captains and crews of the Enterprise use a variety of methods to revisit the past: time warps, the Guardian of Forever, atavachrons, black holes, temporal disruptors, and—if they’re looking for a less risky method of experiencing the past—holodeck simulations. Later Star Trek series even featured a Temporal Prime Directive (enforced by a time police organization, the Federation’s Department of Temporal Investigations) to protect the integrity of the real timeline, since apparently monkeying around with it is irresistible. Kirk, of course, has the biggest file in the department’s database, since his records contain the details of seventeen different occasions when Kirk intervened in the past.

Kirk, Spock, and other Starfleet personnel visit many times and places from our own past, including Nazi Germany, the Roman Empire, the American Old West, the United States during the Great Depression and the Cold War, and Sherlock Holmes’s London. Kirk and others usually want to make the right use of history: preserving the timeline as it should be and learning from it so that they don’t repeat the mistakes of past cultures. In fact, many Starfleet officers seem fascinated with the past: Kirk collects antiques and Jean-Luc Picard dabbles in archaeology, while Benjamin Sisko loves the ancient sport of baseball, which has almost disappeared by the twenty-fourth century.

In using historical settings and people, Star Trek helped shape popular understandings of the past. The series also reflected the social changes that were under way at the time when each show was being written and produced. Successive episodes in the original series mirrored Gene Roddenberry’s own coming to terms with the Vietnam War, and other episodes were commentaries on race relations, feminism, and the hippies of the 1960s. Later Star Trek series and movies were shaped by the concerns of their own decades, and they grappled with species extinctions and ecological disaster, the end of the Cold War, HIV, and terrorism. Since each series was a product of its own time, we can find many events in recent history that help us understand the concerns driving the plots and characters in Star Trek.

Kirk and his companions weren’t concerned only with Earth’s past, however. Star Trek offers us a fascinating array of alien cultures and histories, too. The Vulcans, the Romulans, the Klingons, the Cardassians, and the Bajorans all have their own complex and ancient histories—which are often clearly modeled on human historical cultures, as some of the chapters in this book explore in detail. The Klingon Empire’s rivalry with the Federation in the original Star Trek series paralleled Cold War relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, for example, although Klingon culture also seems to have some medieval features. Cardassian culture, which is heavily militarized and emphasizes the importance of serving the state, was created by Deep Space Nine’s writers to mirror Prussian and Nazi history; one of the show’s producers and writers acknowledged later that he had the German Gestapo in mind when he wrote about the Cardassian Obsidian Order.

Knowing more about our own history helps us to see Star Trek’s people and cultures in a new light. But it’s also true that Star Trek helped us to envision our own future. Star Trek created a vocabulary for the future that was absorbed into everyday life—almost everyone knows what warp speed is nowadays, or beaming up. Indeed, it’s hard for us to envision a future that doesn’t incorporate some of the assumptions, technologies, and settings that originated in Star Trek. As one of this book’s chapters demonstrates, from plasma screens to Bluetooth, we often saw it on Star Trek first. Star Trek thus showed us a bit of the future even decades ago, while projecting our past onto future centuries and cultures. It is the once and future science fiction series: its own timeline still carries us forward along with the Enterprise and her crew, boldly going into both the past and the future.

Part One

Characters [Are] Welcome: Backstories

I signed aboard this ship to practice medicine, not to have my atoms scattered back and forth across space by this gadget.

—McCoy, TOS, Space Seed

Spock: In any case, were I to invoke logic, logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Kirk: Or the one.

—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Chapter 1

Riding Posse on the Final Frontier

James T. Kirk, Hero of the Old West

Alice L. George

Like the Iowa homesteaders who were his forefathers, Captain James T. Kirk is a pioneer, pushing the boundaries of his civilization ever outward. As his opening prologue to the original Star Trek indicates, space is the final frontier, the last new territory to be explored or claimed. Confronting the mysteries that exist on the edges of known space is a key part of Kirk’s mission, but as we try to understand his connection to the American frontier, we find that he is not so much tethered to the real history of the West as he is hog-tied to the mythical Old West. Hiding behind the mask of the proper twenty-third-century starship captain is a Kirk who is part cavalry officer, part riverboat gambler, part lawman, part gunfighter, and part frontier preacher. He has earned a reputation as a man who takes chances and almost always wins. Whether he is sitting in the captain’s chair or exploring the wilderness of an alien planet, Kirk is a white hat, roaming the range with the best of intentions and the worst of suspicions.

Among white Americans, the Western is the only myth truly born from seeds planted on this continent. Its defining elements are an emphasis on the movement of peoples; the isolation of individuals or small groups, far from civilization; and the slow development of cultural order across a territory. Star Trek made its debut at a time when Western TV series and movies were quite popular. During the series’ first season, Bonanza (a Western) was the nation’s most-watched series for a third year in a row. What Star Trek’s producers found was that Western tales’ simple depictions of good versus evil adapted easily to science fiction. Both genres examine life on the edge of settled territory, and at the hearts of both genres are the quests for survival.

Western Culture Lassos Eastern Hearts?

Thanks to the Beadle & Adams dime novels, the first Westerns became widely available in the United States around 1860. Thus, the West’s mythic existence began before its history had fully unfolded, since the settlement of the Western territories by white Americans continued into the late nineteenth century. A growing popular culture focused on celebrities made Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and George Armstrong Custer larger than life. Before most Americans had a chance to learn the facts about Western settlement, Cody was traveling the country with the Wild West Show, which featured Sitting Bull, the chief of the Sioux. The West thus became performance art at the same time that it was becoming history. Three years after the superintendent of the U.S. Census declared the frontier closed in 1890, historian Frederick Jackson Turner put forth his thesis that the unique experience of settling the frontier had played a pivotal role in molding the character and values of Americans. Although the frontier no longer existed, Owen Wister and Zane Grey furthered the Western narrative with their popular novels published during the early twentieth century, and Louis L’Amour and other writers created hundreds of new Western tales later in the century. James T. Kirk is just one of many fictional characters shaped by the patterns that emerge from the Western mythos.

Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, jokingly characterized the concept as "Wagon Train to the stars," and Kirk seems to be cut from the same cloth as the hero of Wister’s Virginian and Bret Maverick of TV and film.¹ Kirk’s capacity for innovation is an essential skill as he patrols the galactic frontier, exploring uncharted paths, defending isolated outposts, and attempting to bring order to untamed sectors of space. In the traditions of the Western hero, Kirk does not shy away from trouble: he gallops toward it, eager for the exploits that await him. Like Western heroes, Kirk fights for freedom from domination and for the rights of the individual. As viewers see Kirk’s startled look when he becomes the first human captain to confront a huge alien spaceship, they are witnessing the same wonder found in the eyes of a frontier farmer who looks into the sky and sees a swarm of locusts bearing down on his little piece of the planet Earth. The sudden intrusion of the unknown is an integral part of the frontier experience.

It is probably no coincidence that one of the synonyms for adventure is enterprise, the name of Kirk’s indomitable steed. The ship’s sensors and the universal translator are Kirk’s scouts, telling him what lies ahead and helping him to communicate with the natives of distant worlds. Two episodes explicitly occur in settings intended to mimic the Old West. Spectre of the Gun is blatantly a Western, with Kirk and his colleagues being forced to replay the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The Paradise Syndrome approaches another side of the Western myth—the portrayal of Indians as noble savages. In this episode, Kirk loses his memory and joins Native Americans transplanted from Earth to a distant planet by a Preserver race. Over the course of a few months, Kirk marries and impregnates an Indian priestess named Miramanee. He revels in the simplicity of his primitive life. Eventually, of course, his colleagues relocate him. Because Kirk’s memory has been restored and because Miramanee has been killed, he is free to return to his life on the Enterprise. Media studies scholar Daniel Bernardi characterizes the decision to kill Miramanee as part of a standard Euro-Indian miscegenation narrative. The native girl dies so that Kirk, the white male hero, isn’t shown unheroically and immorally leaving her and their unborn baby behind. Bernardi believes that this episode, apparently intended to celebrate Native American culture, actually reveals racism among the show’s producers, who stereotyped the Indians as noble savages, showing no progress among them during the centuries since they had been moved to the planet.² In this episode, the amnesiac Kirk crosses a line between meeting a new civilization and becoming a part of it. Like some white drifters who found a home among Native Americans, he experiences a totally different frontier culture.

Barely disguised Western motifs surface in other episodes as well. For instance, in Mudd’s Women, the beautiful ladies are stand-ins for the mail-order brides of yore, and they are on their way to provide companionship for dusty dilithium miners who look very much like the eighty thousand ragged-but-hopeful forty-niners who swept westward in the California gold rush of 1849. The bar on Deep Space Station K-7 in The Trouble with Tribbles seems more like a Western saloon than an intergalactic way station. And in Charlie X, when the adolescent raised by aliens cannot fit into human culture, he is like the freed Indian captives who had trouble finding a place for themselves among whites after spending years in Native American cultures.

In his book, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, Richard Slotkin argues that the popular Westerns of the 1950s and 1960s provided the perfect backdrop for the Cold War era, in which all of the issues were presented in terms of black versus white, with little middle ground for shades of gray. Slotkin notes that Star Trek is particularly reminiscent of empire Western films of the 1930s and 1940s, where individual action is decisive in solving a cosmic struggle. He finds particularly strong parallels in the film Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which follows an established format in which an evil chieftain, half-savage, half aristocrat, attacks, tortures, and massacres innocent beings, leading the forces of good to make a suicidal charge to save civilization. In the film, Khan Noonien Singh is a product of late-twentieth-century genetic engineering, marooned by Kirk years ago on a planet with other genetically enhanced humans. A change in the planet’s orbit and attacks by deadly indigenous creatures give Khan great motivation to plot his revenge against Kirk. When Khan escapes and gains control of a Federation starship, he almost glows with an obsessive need to defeat Kirk.

In their initial engagement, now Admiral Kirk fails to follow protocol and raise his ship’s shields when another Federation ship approaches without any communication. With the Enterprise’s shields down, Khan is able to cripple the ship, but Kirk’s riverboat-gambler persona outwits Khan and the Enterprise is able to escape, only to find that Khan has tortured and killed members of a scientific team working on Project Genesis, which is intended to turn a lifeless planet into a lush paradise. Kirk goes to the center of an asteroid where the actual Genesis experiment is under way, and again, he fools Khan, making him believe that there is no escape from the asteroid. As the film progresses, Kirk’s desire for revenge against Khan comes to equal Khan’s vengeful sentiments toward him. In the end, Khan dies, but in a final desperate act, he sets off the Genesis device, which will destroy all life within its range. The loyal Spock makes the ultimate sacrifice, exposing himself to lethal radiation to save the Enterprise and his friend Kirk. The film ends with the famous Kirk/Spock farewell that includes Spock’s declaration that I have been, and ever shall be, your friend, and the axiom that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Kirk, who has cheated death many times through cleverness, is paralyzed by his closest friend’s willing surrender to the Grim Reaper.

Noble Savages in the Neutral Zone

As William Blake Tyrrell asserts, the white man’s confrontation with the Indian represents the heart of the Western saga. In Kirk’s galaxy, other warrior races such as the Klingons and Romulans embody the frontier’s savage element. The Klingons are most often stereotyped as ruthless and uncivilized people in the original series, but the later versions of Star Trek reveal the civilized code that shaped their culture.

In rare moments, alien races show the nobility that white Americans so want to bestow on savages. While they attack and oppress the weak, their actions are often guided by a code. The Romulans, for example, show more nobility and less savagery than some other alien tribes encountered by the Enterprise, but they remain inscrutable and powerful foes. In Balance of Terror, Kirk finds several Earth outposts destroyed in the borderlands of the Romulan Neutral Zones, and he enters a battle of wits with a Romulan commander, whose cloaked ship emulates the Indian’s mythic ability to disappear into the landscape. One of Kirk’s goals is to catch the Romulans in Federation space as evidence that they have violated a treaty and have victimized poorly protected and poorly manned Federation bases along the frontier. In the end, Kirk wins, and rather than leave evidence of this encounter, the Romulan leader fully displays his alien nature by destroying his ship and everyone aboard. Over the course of his other missions, Kirk interacts with a wide variety of aliens who represent the other lurking in the darkness just out of sight. Some he befriends, but despite the Federation’s own commitment to peace, there are races, such as the Romulans, with whom lasting peace is impossible.

Other humanoid races are not the only challenges that threaten the Federation’s space pioneers. In Westerns, the villain is frequently a corrupt rancher, a vicious outlaw, or an enraged Indian chief; however, the kind of domination that Kirk often struggles to defeat is that which propels his faithful mount—technology. The first rule of the Western adventurer is self-sufficiency, and if all Kirk needed was a pack and a horse, technology would not be cast so often as a villain. However, by accepting technology as an essential partner in human endeavors, twenty-third-century man has embraced a high level of dependency, and in plotlines shaped by twentieth-century anxiety about mechanization, that reliance on technology can be dangerous. Kirk repeatedly faces a computer or an android or a weapon that develops a mind of its own and turns against human interests. He faces this sort of enemy in several TV episodes, including What Are Little Girls Made Of? The Doomsday Machine, The Changeling, Return of the Archons, For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky, I, Mudd, and The Apple, as well as in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Like the typical Western villain, these machines possess single-mindedness and lack depth. Because they do not possess Kirk’s creativity and his ability to reason outside the box, the machines suffer from obvious weaknesses that he can exploit. As he faces a technological enemy, the tension builds toward a showdown in which human intuition and imagination manage to conquer the clockwork precision of a machine mind.

Another often repeated theme is the incompetence of bureaucrats back home, who do not understand the frontier. Like a cavalry officer receiving orders from a Washington-based official who has never been out West, Kirk rankles at interference from those who do not comprehend the realities of daily living on the fringes of civilization. These hapless city slickers range from Ambassador Robert Fox in A Taste of Armageddon to Commodore George Stocker in The Deadly Years to Nilz Baris in The Trouble with Tribbles. Living on the edge as he does, Kirk must assert his independence from bureaucrats and out-of-control technology. Kirk’s occasional rebellion against the Federation and Starfleet officials also reflects an element in the real history of America’s West, where dependence on federal spending nurtured strong antigovernment feeling among its independent people, who resented the fact that Washington’s largesse (granting homestead and mining rights, railroad subsidies, and other resources) made them dependent.³ Kirk’s contemptuous neglect of orders reaches its apex in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, when he directly violates orders by stealing the Enterprise. The word is ‘no,’ he tells his crew. I am therefore going anyway. It is not surprising that Kirk takes his biggest career risk on the glimmer of a hope that he might revive his lost friend Spock, without whom he is not whole.

The ties that bind Kirk and Spock to one another resemble the close partnership between the frontier scout Natty Bumppo and his Indian friend, Chingachgook, in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales.⁴ Like Natty Bumppo, Kirk faces danger in a frontier laden with unknowns, and in his friendship with Spock he is most capable of exercising his individuality and expressing his emotions. Like Bumppo, Kirk must also retain his killer instinct, but at times, he covets Spock’s ability to eschew emotion and follow logic, just as Bumppo admires Chingachgook’s stoicism and seeks to replicate it within himself.⁵ Representing within themselves two different cultures, both heroic pairs function effectively as they blaze new trails together, and their otherness reinforces their ability to thrive. Their closeness allows each to profit from the mysteries of the other’s world and to gain access to that realm without losing touch with his own individuality. Although each would claim close ties to civilization, Kirk and Spock have forsaken the possibility of leading settled lives on their home planets, in a manner that mirrors the lifestyle of Cooper’s characters. Following in the path trodden by the backwoodsman and his Indian ally, Kirk and Spock heed a call of the wild that feeds their explorer spirits.

Like the homesteaders who toiled for years trying to eke out a decent living, Kirk is prepared to work hard and take risks in order to maintain the kind of life he wants. More than once, he rejects the idea of an easily obtained utopia. In This Side of Paradise, people much like the Western settlers leave Earth to establish an agricultural colony on Omicron Ceti III, but they abandon their goals when they are given the opportunity to enjoy an artificial utopia. Once they discover alien spores that infiltrate their bodies and bring a sense of happiness and belonging, their ambition and desire to work hard dissolve. After the entire Enterprise crew mutinies in order to share in this Shangri-La and only Kirk remains unaffected, he finds a way to disrupt the effect of the spores. Maybe we weren’t meant for paradise, he says. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can’t stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of the drums. He also argues that man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.

The typical Western hero adapts by becoming more like the frontier, absorbing some of its savagery and turning from a civilized man into a lone wolf, capable of surviving in this new environment. Part of Kirk’s mission is to learn—and he does. Like Shane and other Western heroes, he is not afraid to engage in physical combat against a single opponent; however, he devotes a great deal of energy to his sometimes unsuccessful struggle to remain loyal to the high ideals of his culture. Nevertheless, one of the key arguments of Star Trek is that men in the future will evolve beyond beings that operate on instinct. They will struggle to apply reason to their actions, but unlike Spock, real men always will feel the magnetic pull of those impulses, sometimes surrendering to them and sometimes overcoming them with the help of intellect. With his killer instinct intact, Kirk struggles with the temptation to engage in conflict whenever he meets adversity. Spock’s insights sometimes help him find the course he is seeking. As he tells the Eminiar in A Taste of Armageddon, "We’re human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we’re killers, but we’re not going to kill today. That’s all it takes."

In spite of his many similarities to Western heroes, it would be wrong to ignore the obvious differences. The biggest distinction between James T. Kirk and the traditional Western hero is that Kirk is not alone. He reflects the American ideal of individualism, but he is not a lone gunman facing off against his enemy at high noon. Instead, he both leads and represents his colleagues on the Enterprise, and to a degree, he epitomizes the people of Earth. He and Spock may sometimes function as two men isolated from all others, but at the end of the day they are responsible for more than four hundred men and women and billions more on Earth. Kirk relies on members of the crew to strengthen his moral compass and to bolster his strategic planning. Another key element separating Kirk from the Western hero is his close ties to civilization: Western heroes often represent instinct as opposed to culture, but like many other science fiction adventurers, Captain Kirk is promoting a more advanced culture that embodies higher ideals.⁶ Furthermore, the search for material wealth often fuels Western settlement, and that drive is entirely foreign to Kirk.

The Federation’s Manifest Destiny

The lofty ideals of the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet are not powered by monetary motives; nevertheless, there is at least a whiff of Manifest Destiny in Kirk and in the missions assigned to him. Whether acting under orders or not, Kirk sometimes tries to force his way into other races’ territories and to mandate contact. For instance, he ignores a warning buoy in The Corbomite Maneuver and invades First Federation space. In Spectre of the Gun, he receives a clear message that the Melkotians want no contact with humans, and yet, he proceeds into orbit around their planet. In A Taste of Armageddon, under orders from Ambassador Fox, Kirk seeks to force contact with the inhabitants of Eminiar VII. Like the white Americans who continued moving deeper and deeper into Indian territories in violation of treaties, Kirk sometimes sees only his own goals—not how they affect the peoples who happen to be in his way.

Another facet of Manifest Destiny can be seen in Arena and The Devil in the Dark. In Arena, when Kirk finds the Federation colony at Cestus III has been destroyed, he immediately attacks the reptilian Gorn species and pursues them. Spock tries to end the chase, but Kirk will not stop. He asks Spock, How can you explain a massacre like that? Later, he learns that Cestus III was a part of the Gorn’s sphere of influence and that the Federation colonists were, in fact, the invaders. In The Devil in the Dark, Kirk orders his men to kill the shaggy, silicon-based life-form called a Horta, which is interfering with mining operations that are important to the Federation. Here, as in the exploitation of the Indians and the taking of their lands by the U.S. government, the ends justify the means. If it is necessary to kill an alien creature that appears to be one of a kind, Kirk is willing to do that to return the mine to a normal work schedule. Eventually, he finds that the miners have been destroying the creature’s eggs, and as he does in Arena, he makes the choice to save the alien’s life.

Like many of the people who settled the American West, Kirk has an ambivalent relationship with death and extinction. He combines a wistful respect for life with a reckless haste. In The Man Trap, he makes little attempt to reach a peaceful agreement with the last-surviving member of a salt-craving race. His emphasis is placed entirely on saving his crew and killing the creature, but after Dr. Leonard McCoy kills the creature to save Kirk’s life, a contemplative Kirk tells Spock that he is thinking about the buffalo, which once covered the plains of North America in huge herds. The people who brought about the extinction of the buffalo missed them when they were gone, but apparently they could not stop themselves from carrying out the almost total destruction of the species. By eradicating the buffalo, these men were destroying a way of life for those plains Indians who had not already fallen prey to white people’s diseases or to their bullets. Kirk’s acknowledgment of his own role in contributing to the extinction of a species represents the civilized man’s regrets that he must exterminate others to preserve his own kind, while also demoting the alien in Man Trap to the status of grass-grazing quadrupeds. Interestingly, in all three of these episodes, Kirk’s foe was a creature extremely alien to him, rather than a somewhat different humanoid.

Kirk is more open to correcting his errors than the nineteenth-century settlers and oppotunists who spread across the western United States like a plague on the Indians. Nevertheless, many episodes are driven by his biased assumptions. That the ends justify the means for Kirk is best spelled out in A Private Little War, the Vietnam allegory in which Kirk fuels an arms race among primitive people because the evil Klingons are arming the other side, as Bruce Franklin discusses in another chapter in this volume. The same message becomes clear in The Enterprise Incident, when Kirk flagrantly steals a Romulan cloaking device. In the West, this rationale provided the justification for cavalry men and vigilantes to commit atrocities against Indian villages that they saw as potential threats to white settlers. In Star Trek, the Federation’s fears and its needs obviously outweigh every other consideration—the same could be said for white settlers’ interests on the frontier.

In some ways, Kirk is similar to one real-life Western adventurer. His charisma and sometimes foolhardy daring are reminiscent of George Armstrong Custer, who, like Kirk, apparently never considered the likelihood of a no-win scenario. Custer met his Kobayashi Maru at the Little Bighorn, while the much-luckier Kirk survives many close calls by rewriting the rules of conduct. Part of the public fascination with Custer springs from his long-burnished image as a heroic figure—an image with a foundation almost as fictitious as James T. Kirk’s. After a period of revisionism in which Custer was labeled as a reckless bumbler, historians now seem to be swinging back toward a more even-handed evaluation in which Custer is seen as neither an egomaniacal warrior nor a heroic officer. He remains a fascinating leader, and both Custer and Kirk resonate with legendary heroism. Just as Sparta’s Leonidas faced an overwhelming horde of barbarians at Thermopylae, Custer confronted an overwhelming force of angry Indians. Kirk, too, steps into the breach more than once to defend and promote the United Federation of Planets against an apparently superior enemy.

Like Custer and many of the whites who settled the American frontier in the nineteenth century, Kirk sees himself as an agent of civilization, and he often chooses to force his perspective on others who have no interest in his brand of peace. Moreover, Kirk’s many uninvited forays into alien space bear similarity to Custer’s violation of the Black Hills, which, by treaty, belonged to the Lakota people (the Sioux). The same sense of entitlement that drove Custer also spurs Kirk into some clashes. A perceived right to make contact and to gain new information propels Kirk from mission to mission. Custer was driven by a less admirable motive: the unending white hunger for wealth in the form of land and gold.

Matthew Wilhelm Kapell notes that the myth of James T. Kirk is no more fantastic than the legend of Wild Bill Hickok. In fact, the Hickok legend’s central confrontation—a gunfight with the train-robbing McCanles Gang—may never have happened, and yet the story has been elaborated through a biography, a dime novel, multiple movies, a TV series, and magazine and newspaper articles. In fact, Kapell suggests that the myth of Hickok may have as little to do with history as the fictional existence of James T. Kirk does.⁷

JFK, JTK, and the Final New Frontier

Stepping outside the Western myth and taking a look at the use of its imagery, it seems clear that the designation of space as the Final Frontier might have come from a piece of real history—John F. Kennedy’s decision to call his agenda the New Frontier during the 1960 presidential election campaign. Representing himself as an agent of change in a period of great unknowns, particularly where nuclear weapons and space travel were concerned, Kennedy found resonance in the frontier label. As he asked Americans to make sacrifices to help their nation, he recalled the inner strength required to survive on the hardscrabble frontier, a quality that was central to the American myth of the West. Technology, which included nuclear weaponry, created new challenges for Americans in the Kennedy years, but social challenges such as African Americans’ drive for equal rights also required Americans to demonstrate bravery and the willingness to change. Kennedy has enjoyed a bifurcated afterlife as both a mythical hero and a historical figure, and it’s clear that the mythical John F. Kennedy and the fictional James T. Kirk have more in common than similar initials. As leaders, they venerate courage and toughness in the face of adversity. As men, they have a weakness for the opposite sex, and both are endowed with wit, good looks, and eloquence.

If Kirk’s connection to the Western mythos requires any further proof, one need only examine the later Star Trek movies and series, which tie Kirk to Western imagery. In The Next Generation’s Unification, Part II, Captain Jean-Luc Picard refers to Kirk’s work as cowboy diplomacy, and in Voyager’s Flashback Captain Kathryn Janeway expresses an unfulfillable wish to ride shotgun with an officer like Kirk. In addition, Western episodes found their way into both The Next Generation and Enterprise. Lincoln Geraghty has written that Enterprise’s theme can be reduced to two words: pioneer spirit.⁸ Deep Space Nine also connects itself to this milieu through its remote location and through Dr. Julian Bashir’s desire to practice frontier medicine.

By embracing the Old West, William Blake Tyrell contends that Star Trek takes our roots and disguises them as branches for some of us to cling to.⁹ Locating the science fiction future in the frontier of the past enabled the series’ producers to achieve several goals. By making the show quintessentially American, it offered the hope of a brighter future to those people struggling through the political and civil conflicts of the late 1960s in the United States. At the same time, a science fiction setting established a psychological and sociological distance from current events, which made it possible for the series to comment on situations in the real world (like Vietnam) without generating political opposition. Star Trek also was able to rework an imperfect American past by using a mythic Old West to promise a brighter and greater future. The series thus offered viewers the stability found in the familiarity of a nostalgic past, even as they faced the uncertainty of the future.

As Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen explain in Deep Space and Sacred Time: Star Trek in the American Mythos, A Hollywood Western may or may not deserve to be called mythic in itself, but it is part of America’s foundational myth of the Old West, a myth that addresses in a uniquely American way our national preoccupation with the individual vs. society, nature vs. culture, and the wild vs. the tame.¹⁰ In many ways, these issues are Star Trek’s as well. We learn that humans of the twenty-third century celebrate the differences between individuals and value that uniqueness as an ingredient in society. The Prime Directive is not blatantly an issue of nature versus culture, but it is aimed at protecting naturally developing alien cultures from losing their way as a result of unnatural interference. The officers of Starfleet are trained to respect the wild in its own environment, while helping civilization to tame the unruly forces that threaten to generate galactic chaos.

James T. Kirk abounds with

Reviews for Star Trek and History

[alun-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A mixed bag. Tony Keen's chapter comparing the rise of Augustus with Napoleon, Hitler and Palpatine is sane as modern leaders have often explicitly presented themselves as the heirs to Rome, and Star Wars clearly has Roman influences. Crucially, because this isn't nailing a wafer thin metaphor to a historical idea, he's able to contrast as well as compare Star Wars to history.There are some other good chapters Kevin S. Decker is also able to usefully find ancient parallels and differences. Lori Maguire compares the Death Star to modern thoughts about nuclear weapons and the influence of the film on ideas about the USA's SDI "Star Wars" defence.Some chapters are ok and some are poor. Often Star Wars is used as a starting point for whatever the authors really wanted to talk about.One chapter, by Paul Horvath and Mark Higbee is surely a Sokal-style send-up of the idea. Their chapter includes the sentence: "In A New Hope, the Rebels destroy the enemy's most powerful weapon, the Death Star; in the Civil War, emancipation destroyed the Confederates' reason for war, as well as the foundation of their economic system." The idea that two people would sit down and sincerely say: "In many ways freeing the slaves of the Confederacy is just like blowing up a Death Star," is absolutely terrifying.On the whole, the book seems to be pitched as a history book for people who don't really like history, but like Star Wars. If this sounds like you, I'd go for a Star Wars book instead