November 22, 2023 • 11 mins
Blackbeard was killed on this day in 1718. There's more to the story in the May 5, 2014 episode of Stuff You Missed in History Class.
On this day in 1968, during a turbulent year for race relations in America, actors William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols shared a prominent kiss on an episode of Star Trek.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey there, history fans. We're off through the end of November,
but we've got plenty of classic shows to tide you over.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from HowStuffWorks dot
Com and from the desk of Stuff you Missed in
History Class. It's the show where we explore the past
one day at a time with a quick look at
what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's November twenty second. Blackbeard
(00:29):
died on this day in seventeen eighteen. That was, of course,
the nickname of an infamous pirate named Edward Teach or
perhaps Thatch. That nickname came from his big black beard,
which he was reported to accentuate with lit matches or candles.
He was probably born in Bristol, England, but like a
lot of pirates, his origins and his early life are unclear.
(00:52):
He probably got his start at sea as a privateer
during Queen Anne's War, which was part of the War
of Spanish Succession, shifting to outright piracy once that war
was over and there was no military reason for him
to be plundering French and Spanish ships anymore. He established
a base on the outer banks of North Carolina, and
(01:12):
his flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, had previously been a
French slave ship called La Concord. When he took this ship,
he left most of the enslaved people aboard with the
captain in a smaller sloop, he kept sixty one aboard
what became the Queen An's Revenge. It seems as though
he absorbed these people into his crew rather than considering
(01:34):
them to be enslaved. That was often how pirates handled
the enslaved people that they captured. They treated them more
as crew members than as enslaved workers. His fleet had
up to four ships at any given time. They were
crewed by as many as two hundred men, and they
plundered off the coast of North America and in the Caribbean,
(01:55):
becoming really notorious. The peak of his pirate activity was
from seventeen sixteen to seventeen eighteen, after being mentored by
Captain Benjamin Hornigold, when he was serving as a member
of Hornegold's crew. While the nations whose ships he was
targeting feared and deplored him, for the most part, the
population of the Carolinas tolerated or even encouraged black Beard's
(02:20):
piracy off their coast. Local officials were willing to take
bribes to look the other way, and his plundering of
these other ships meant that the locals were getting duty
free goods that would be a lot more expensive otherwise,
so he became something of a folk hero locally. That
started to change, though, after he blockaded the port of
Charleston in May of seventeen eighteen and took hostages that
(02:42):
he didn't release until the city paid a huge ransom
on them. The Queen Anne's Revenge and another of Blackbeard's ships,
the Adventure, both ran aground not long after that, and
they were lost. He had to break up a lot
of his pirate company at that point, and then to
try to continue doing what he was doing in a
much smaller sloop. Then he was killed in a battle
(03:04):
in Ochrecoke Inlet just about six months later. On November
twenty second, seventeen eighteen, what started out as a naval
battle between two ships ended with heavy fighting aboard the
sloop of the Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard. The pirates
were lured onto this sloop after what they had thought
was a battle that they had won, but it turned
(03:26):
out that Maynard and several uninjured men were hidden below decks.
That final fight was very bloody, with Blackbeard being shot
and struck with swords repeatedly before dying. Maynard returned to
Virginia afterward with Blackbeard's head hanging from the bow. His
body had been thrown overboard. The wreck of the Queen
(03:47):
Anne's Revenge was found in nineteen ninety six, and extensive
underwater archaeological work has been done since then. Huge numbers
of artifacts had been brought to the surface for conservation
and in some cases dis blay. The QAAR Conservation Laboratory
was dedicated for this purpose in two thousand and four.
Thanks to Casey Pegram and Chandler Mays for their audio
(04:09):
work on this show. You can subscribe to The Day
in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever
else you get your podcasts, and you can tune in
tomorrow for an insurrection that lasted for months.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Hello, and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those interested in the big and small moments
of history. I'm Gabelusier, and in this episode we're talking
about one of the most famous kisses in the Galaxy
and how it reflected a changing perspective on race in
(04:52):
the late nineteen sixties. The day was November twenty second,
nineteen sixty eight, during a turbulent year for race relations
in America. Actors William Shatner and Michelle Nichols shared a
(05:14):
prominent kiss on an episode of Star Trek. According to
Gallup polls, when the episode premiered, fewer than twenty percent
of Americans approved of marriage between white and black people.
While still pretty low, that was way up from the
less than five percent who approved just one decade earlier.
(05:35):
Acceptance of mixed race relationships was on the rise in
the US, and the kiss on Star Trek was an
early sign of that changing point of view and of
the victories of the ongoing civil rights movement. A campy
sixties sci fi show might seem like an odd vehicle
for delivering a cultural message, but the genre and the
(05:57):
show were actually well suited to the ten. As William
Shatner once explained, quote, setting Star Trek three hundred years
in the future allowed creator Gene Roddenberry to focus on
the social issues of the nineteen sixties without being direct
or obvious. Despite its standing as a landmark moment in
(06:20):
American television, the kiss between Shatner and Nichols is about
as far from romantic as you can get. It takes
place in a third season episode of the original series
titled Plato's step Children. The admittedly strange plot follows the
crew of the USS Enterprise as they encounter a group
(06:41):
of human like aliens called the Playtonians, who patterned their
culture after the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers Plato
and Socrates. Despite their high minded culture, or perhaps because
of it, the aliens turned out to be arrogant and
cruel in the episode. Using their telekinetic powers, which is
(07:03):
a whole story in itself, the aliens control the Enterprise
crew like puppets for their own amusement. In one scene,
they force an embrace between the black communications officer played
by Nichols and the white captain played by Shatner. Both
characters attempt to resist, but in the end, Lieutenant Uhura
(07:25):
and Captain Kirk are forced to kiss as the Playtonians
look on like the total creeps they are. The episode
was slated to premiere just a little over a year
after the Supreme Court delivered its historic ruling on the
case of Loving v. Virginia. That decision struck down several
(07:45):
state laws and declared interracial marriage legal in the United States.
In light of the racial climate in the country, NBC
executives were nervous when they saw the script for Plato's
step children. They were worried than an interracial kiss might
have set their TV station affiliates and viewers in the
Deep South. The scene was shot as scripted, but to
(08:09):
appease the networks, the showrunners also filmed an alternate version
with the kiss occurring off screen. However, Nachelle Nichols later
wrote in her autobiography that she and Shatner deliberately messed
up their lines so that the original take would have
to be used. She wrote, quote, we did a few takes,
(08:31):
but Bill was deliberately trying to flub it. At one
point he even crossed his eyes to make me laugh.
In the end, all the concern was for nothing. The
episode aired with the kiss intact, and the network heard
few complaints. According to Nichols, the episode did get more
fan mail than the Paramount studio had ever received for
(08:54):
a single episode of Star Trek, but the majority of
letters were positive. In the decades that followed, intimacy between
black and white characters became more and more common on television.
But it's worth noting that the kiss between Kirk and
Uhura wasn't the first TV kiss between actors of different races.
(09:15):
In fact, it wasn't even the first interracial kiss on
Star Trek, and that's to say nothing of earlier shows
going as far back as the nineteen fifties, such as
I Love Lucy. It all depends on what you consider
a kiss and how you distinguish one ethnicity from another.
But the truth is it doesn't really matter which TV
(09:37):
kiss came before or after another. In the end, each
one was important to someone watching at home, someone who
was seeing their own relationships reflected on screen for the
first time in their lives. That may sound like a
stretch given the unromantic context of the kiss on Star Trek,
but consider this. The kiss between Ahura and Kirk didn't
(10:01):
shock any of the characters in the show. It's not
played for laughs, and their difference in race isn't written
as an issue for anyone. In fact, there's no comment
or discussion of it at all. For some viewers, that
was a welcome change from real life and a chance
to imagine a similar future for themselves, a better one
(10:23):
where they could love as they please without other people's
hang ups getting in the way. I'm Gabe Lucier and
hopefully you now know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. If you enjoyed the show, consider
rating and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts. You can also
(10:44):
follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show,
and if you have any thoughts or suggestions you'd like
to share, you can beam them on over to This
Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for
producing the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see
you back here again tomorrow for another day in History class.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey there, history fans. We're off through the end of November,
but we've got plenty of classic shows to tide you over.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Welcome to This Day in History Class from HowStuffWorks dot
Com and from the desk of Stuff you Missed in
History Class. It's the show where we explore the past
one day at a time with a quick look at
what happened today in history. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and it's November twenty second. Blackbeard
(00:29):
died on this day in seventeen eighteen. That was, of course,
the nickname of an infamous pirate named Edward Teach or
perhaps Thatch. That nickname came from his big black beard,
which he was reported to accentuate with lit matches or candles.
He was probably born in Bristol, England, but like a
lot of pirates, his origins and his early life are unclear.
(00:52):
He probably got his start at sea as a privateer
during Queen Anne's War, which was part of the War
of Spanish Succession, shifting to outright piracy once that war
was over and there was no military reason for him
to be plundering French and Spanish ships anymore. He established
a base on the outer banks of North Carolina, and
(01:12):
his flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge, had previously been a
French slave ship called La Concord. When he took this ship,
he left most of the enslaved people aboard with the
captain in a smaller sloop, he kept sixty one aboard
what became the Queen An's Revenge. It seems as though
he absorbed these people into his crew rather than considering
(01:34):
them to be enslaved. That was often how pirates handled
the enslaved people that they captured. They treated them more
as crew members than as enslaved workers. His fleet had
up to four ships at any given time. They were
crewed by as many as two hundred men, and they
plundered off the coast of North America and in the Caribbean,
(01:55):
becoming really notorious. The peak of his pirate activity was
from seventeen sixteen to seventeen eighteen, after being mentored by
Captain Benjamin Hornigold, when he was serving as a member
of Hornegold's crew. While the nations whose ships he was
targeting feared and deplored him, for the most part, the
population of the Carolinas tolerated or even encouraged black Beard's
(02:20):
piracy off their coast. Local officials were willing to take
bribes to look the other way, and his plundering of
these other ships meant that the locals were getting duty
free goods that would be a lot more expensive otherwise,
so he became something of a folk hero locally. That
started to change, though, after he blockaded the port of
Charleston in May of seventeen eighteen and took hostages that
(02:42):
he didn't release until the city paid a huge ransom
on them. The Queen Anne's Revenge and another of Blackbeard's ships,
the Adventure, both ran aground not long after that, and
they were lost. He had to break up a lot
of his pirate company at that point, and then to
try to continue doing what he was doing in a
much smaller sloop. Then he was killed in a battle
(03:04):
in Ochrecoke Inlet just about six months later. On November
twenty second, seventeen eighteen, what started out as a naval
battle between two ships ended with heavy fighting aboard the
sloop of the Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard. The pirates
were lured onto this sloop after what they had thought
was a battle that they had won, but it turned
(03:26):
out that Maynard and several uninjured men were hidden below decks.
That final fight was very bloody, with Blackbeard being shot
and struck with swords repeatedly before dying. Maynard returned to
Virginia afterward with Blackbeard's head hanging from the bow. His
body had been thrown overboard. The wreck of the Queen
(03:47):
Anne's Revenge was found in nineteen ninety six, and extensive
underwater archaeological work has been done since then. Huge numbers
of artifacts had been brought to the surface for conservation
and in some cases dis blay. The QAAR Conservation Laboratory
was dedicated for this purpose in two thousand and four.
Thanks to Casey Pegram and Chandler Mays for their audio
(04:09):
work on this show. You can subscribe to The Day
in History Class on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and wherever
else you get your podcasts, and you can tune in
tomorrow for an insurrection that lasted for months.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Hello, and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those interested in the big and small moments
of history. I'm Gabelusier, and in this episode we're talking
about one of the most famous kisses in the Galaxy
and how it reflected a changing perspective on race in
(04:52):
the late nineteen sixties. The day was November twenty second,
nineteen sixty eight, during a turbulent year for race relations
in America. Actors William Shatner and Michelle Nichols shared a
(05:14):
prominent kiss on an episode of Star Trek. According to
Gallup polls, when the episode premiered, fewer than twenty percent
of Americans approved of marriage between white and black people.
While still pretty low, that was way up from the
less than five percent who approved just one decade earlier.
(05:35):
Acceptance of mixed race relationships was on the rise in
the US, and the kiss on Star Trek was an
early sign of that changing point of view and of
the victories of the ongoing civil rights movement. A campy
sixties sci fi show might seem like an odd vehicle
for delivering a cultural message, but the genre and the
(05:57):
show were actually well suited to the ten. As William
Shatner once explained, quote, setting Star Trek three hundred years
in the future allowed creator Gene Roddenberry to focus on
the social issues of the nineteen sixties without being direct
or obvious. Despite its standing as a landmark moment in
(06:20):
American television, the kiss between Shatner and Nichols is about
as far from romantic as you can get. It takes
place in a third season episode of the original series
titled Plato's step Children. The admittedly strange plot follows the
crew of the USS Enterprise as they encounter a group
(06:41):
of human like aliens called the Playtonians, who patterned their
culture after the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers Plato
and Socrates. Despite their high minded culture, or perhaps because
of it, the aliens turned out to be arrogant and
cruel in the episode. Using their telekinetic powers, which is
(07:03):
a whole story in itself, the aliens control the Enterprise
crew like puppets for their own amusement. In one scene,
they force an embrace between the black communications officer played
by Nichols and the white captain played by Shatner. Both
characters attempt to resist, but in the end, Lieutenant Uhura
(07:25):
and Captain Kirk are forced to kiss as the Playtonians
look on like the total creeps they are. The episode
was slated to premiere just a little over a year
after the Supreme Court delivered its historic ruling on the
case of Loving v. Virginia. That decision struck down several
(07:45):
state laws and declared interracial marriage legal in the United States.
In light of the racial climate in the country, NBC
executives were nervous when they saw the script for Plato's
step children. They were worried than an interracial kiss might
have set their TV station affiliates and viewers in the
Deep South. The scene was shot as scripted, but to
(08:09):
appease the networks, the showrunners also filmed an alternate version
with the kiss occurring off screen. However, Nachelle Nichols later
wrote in her autobiography that she and Shatner deliberately messed
up their lines so that the original take would have
to be used. She wrote, quote, we did a few takes,
(08:31):
but Bill was deliberately trying to flub it. At one
point he even crossed his eyes to make me laugh.
In the end, all the concern was for nothing. The
episode aired with the kiss intact, and the network heard
few complaints. According to Nichols, the episode did get more
fan mail than the Paramount studio had ever received for
(08:54):
a single episode of Star Trek, but the majority of
letters were positive. In the decades that followed, intimacy between
black and white characters became more and more common on television.
But it's worth noting that the kiss between Kirk and
Uhura wasn't the first TV kiss between actors of different races.
(09:15):
In fact, it wasn't even the first interracial kiss on
Star Trek, and that's to say nothing of earlier shows
going as far back as the nineteen fifties, such as
I Love Lucy. It all depends on what you consider
a kiss and how you distinguish one ethnicity from another.
But the truth is it doesn't really matter which TV
(09:37):
kiss came before or after another. In the end, each
one was important to someone watching at home, someone who
was seeing their own relationships reflected on screen for the
first time in their lives. That may sound like a
stretch given the unromantic context of the kiss on Star Trek,
but consider this. The kiss between Ahura and Kirk didn't
(10:01):
shock any of the characters in the show. It's not
played for laughs, and their difference in race isn't written
as an issue for anyone. In fact, there's no comment
or discussion of it at all. For some viewers, that
was a welcome change from real life and a chance
to imagine a similar future for themselves, a better one
(10:23):
where they could love as they please without other people's
hang ups getting in the way. I'm Gabe Lucier and
hopefully you now know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. If you enjoyed the show, consider
rating and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts. You can also
(10:44):
follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at TDI HC Show,
and if you have any thoughts or suggestions you'd like
to share, you can beam them on over to This
Day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for
producing the show, and thank you for listening. I'll see
you back here again tomorrow for another day in History class.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
This Day in History Class News
Host
Gabe Luzier
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.