Six 2-ring binders and seven arch-lever files with ancient history notes in my study had their origin 14 years ago--in 1993. At that time I taught four different history courses: 'the history of ideas,' two courses in 'ancient history' and one in 'modern history.' By 1995 I was no longer teaching history and I finished my career in the Human Services section of Tafe where history was integrated into the Human Services courses.

Teaching in Tafe in the 1990s was a kaleidoscopic affair with dozens of syllabi as part of my teaching responsibilities. I kept the ancient history notes I made in the years 1989-1994 and they have now been expanded to occupy some 13 files in a separate section of this study. The modern history and the history of ideas files were condensed into one file in 2000 and, by 2005, these resources had expanded to six files. I have added a good deal of material since retiring from teaching in 1999 and it appears that the future will see an extensive expansion of these history resources.

My contact with history in institutions of learning goes back, as far as I remember, to middle primary school when I was ten years old in 1954/5, over fifty years ago. If I took any history before the age of ten and it is likely that I did, I have no memory of the experience, the content or the process. I’m sure there was some attention paid to history in the early years of primary school from 1949 to 1953 in Canada.

Each year until I finished university in 1967 I studied some course in history, although in my third year of university, when I majored in sociology, the closest I got to a formal history course was one in sociological theory.

During my teaching career, when I was a primary and secondary teacher from 1967 to 1973, history came under the umbrella of social studies. From 1974 onwards, working in post-secondary education, until I retired from teaching in 1999, most of the history I taught continued to be within some social science framework, with the exception of matriculation history at Tafe in the late 1980s and early 1990s and that history of ideas course whose notes formed the embryo of what is found here. In the first six years of my retirement, 1999 to 2005, I taught history under the umbrella of various social science and humanities subjects at a local School for Seniors. But now all of this formal teaching is finished and it looks like it will remain so.

The influence of my grandfather, while I lived under his roof from my birth to the age of three and later when he used to visit my mother, father and I until his death when I was fourteen in 1958, can not be quantified. He used to read history extensively out of personal interest. His influence is beyond question. The influences of others, academics like Douglas Martin, Jameson Bond, Elizabeth and Michael Rochester, all within the Baha’i community and many others outside that community could be listed here and discussed. But this is not the place.

Ron Price
24 October 2006