Introduction
The past is still, for us, a place that is not safely settled.
Michael Ondaatje
TWO BIG STORIES IN HISTORY
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a prolific and learned English-born historian of Spanish descent, begins his new book as follows: History has two big stories to tell. The first is the very long story of how human cultures diverged—how they parted and developed differences, in ignorance or contempt of one another. The second is the main subject of this book: a relatively short and recent story of convergence—of how human groups got back in touch, exchanged culture, copied each other’s lives, and became more like each other again. Go to this link for more:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/apr/12/how-the-winds-changed-history/
INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY FILES IN MY STUDY
The fifteen arch-lever files and seven two-ring binders I now have in my study, filled to the rafters with notes and photocopy material on the subject of history, had their origin eighteen years ago--in 1993. At that time I was teaching four different history courses: the history of ideas, ancient history(2), and modern history. By 1995 I was no longer teaching any of these history courses. I finished my career as a professional teacher in the Human Services section of a Technical and Further Education(Tafe) college where history was integrated into Human Services courses. Teaching in Tafe in the 1990s was a kaleidoscopic affair for me 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 my 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 seven arch-lever files and six two-ring binders. I have added a good deal of material since retiring from teaching in 1999 and from PT and casual-volunteer teaching in 2005. I think that the future will see an extensive expansion of this new core of history resources if the first dozen years of my retirement is anything to go by.
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. 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 with its base in history.
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 as I say above, 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. That history of ideas course whose notes formed the embryo of what is found now in some seven files, was also an exception to this general rule. 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, six years later in 2011, all of this formal teaching is finished and it looks like it will remain so. After some 32 years in classrooms as a teacher and another 18 as a student, I no longer have any desire to teach. In some ways, of course, my formal classroom teaching has become informal, indirect, teaching in cyberspace, and this has taken place now for more than a decade: 2000 to 2011.
SOME OF MY POSTS ON HISTORY ON THE INTERNET
Any interest I have in an educative role, in the role of teacher, I find it--as I say above--on the internet where I write a great deal about history. See the following links for some examples of my posts on aspects of history:
http://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&cp=17&gs_id=2z&xhr=t&q=Ron+Price+history&pf=p&sclient=Ron+Price+history
(I have dozens of posts at the above link, but readers are advised that in the first 100 sub-sites other 'Prices' are also found)
http://www.historum.com/search.
http://www.boxingasylum.com/fight-rules-ring-tv-series-boxing-history
http://www.tv.com/australia/the-kennedys-a-retrospective/topic/
http://hubpages.com/forum/topic
http://www.buzzle.com/authors.author
http://lesendrei.webs.com/apps/forums/topics/-appreciation-of-ron-price-after-viewing-les-endrei
SOME EARLY INFLUENCES ON MY INTEREST IN HISTORY
The influence of my grandfather on my interest in history can not be quantified. I lived under his roof from my birth to the age of three, 1944 to 1947, and later he used to visit my mother, father and I until his death when I was fourteen in 1958. He used to read history extensively out of personal interest. His influence, although unquantifiable, 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. Three of the professors I had during my university years, 1963-1967, were highly influential. One of them was Dr. George Grant(1918-1988) a Canadian philosopher, teacher and political commentator whose popular appeal peaked in the late 1960s and 1970s after I left university. Dr. Grant was a faculty member of McMaster University's Religion department from 1961 to 1980. He founded and led this department in the 1960s and early 70s.
Ron Price
24 October 2006 to 18 November 2011
NIEBUHR:1
In 1971, half way through the first century of the Formative Age, a Baha'i term for the period in this new Faith's history beginning in 1921, I became an international pioneer from Canada to Australia. I was 27. That same year Reinhold Niebuhr died(1892-1971). Niebuhr was the most influential American theologian of the 20th century.(1) Niebuhr was born the year Baha’u’llah died, 1892. I came across his writings and his ideas occasionally beginning in the 1960s while at university and when I started reading, in a way that could be described as serious. His major books, all published between 1932 to 1952, serve as an interesting backdrop to the evolution of embryonic Baha’i administrative institutions and the Baha’i community I have now been associated with for nearly 60 years. Evolving at the time of the great wars and the evils resulting from the political and ideological ambitions of men like Stalin and Hitler, the Baha’i institutional matrix rose phoenix-like out of the Baha'i community's blood-stained history as well as the wider human community’s ruin in the trenches of Europe and their catalogue of horrors, worse than history had ever seen.
In 1952, on the eve of the inception of the Kingdom of God on earth, as ‘Abdu’l-Baha referred to 1953, Niebuhr wrote that there was “a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America.”(1) Niebuhr had no idea that the Baha’i community, then in its infancy—less than 60 years on American soil—represented the fulfilment of that messianism, at least to the then fledgling Baha'i community. -Ron Price with thanks to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr,” The New York Times, September 2005.
There are no absolutes here,
Reinhold, only the relativity
of religious truth & shadowy,
fitful & imperfect understanding.
Yes, we see through a glass darkly
and we must see it with humility,
if we are to reconcile the world’s
contradictory absolutes with truths
that are perennial but not archaic
and thus deal with the Almighty’s
infinite mystery and His apparently
very incompatible communications.
The hazards of struggle we must see
with eyes not blinded by conviction,
by vainglory, self-righteousness and
the endless feeling that we are right.
For that Source of all glory & majesty
has purposes to which we are not privy
and He does not always sanctify what
we most fervently desire and a sense of
contrition regarding foibles & frailties
is not always ours amidst our faiths and
our certitudes. Our management of
history must always be with a matrix of
faith and doubt, with a modesty about
the virtue, wisdom and power available
to us for the resolution of its perplexities.
Ron Price
17 September 2005 to31 October 2011
NIEBUHR-2-KEEPING THE VEHICLE ROLLING
In 1962, the year I became a Baha'i, Jimmy Carter was elected to the Georgia state senate. I was 18; Jimmy was 38. He was also a committed Southern Baptist and, as the years went on, he became stronger in his religious commitment, a commitment he took with him to the presidency in 1976 to help counter the Watergate scandal. As the years went on in my own life my religious commitment became stronger, although there were periods of doubt, of feelings of spiritual inadequacy and burnout. Carter, too, had his doubts and inadequacies and the electorate became dissatisfied with his way of handling many issues. As I watched Jimmy Carter's life unfold in this TV documentary it was clear that, for both of us, religion was at the centre of our lives. Theologican Reinhold Niebuhr, a liberal Protestant thinker, influenced Carter in the 1970s and 1980s. It was impossible for me to highlight any one particular thinker, either inside or outside Baha'i circles, who influenced me. There were so many. -Ron Price with thanks to ABC TV, "Jimmy Carter," 8:30-9:30 pm, 17 November 2003.
You were a persistent little fellow,
Jimmy, shaking a thousand thousand
hands with a PR machine that put you
in the White House. I needed that
same persistence and I had it, too,
for those years after ’62.
But one runs out of gas, Jimmy.
I ran out several times and
had to tank up yet again
to keep the vehicle rolling.
I’m not running on empty now,
but I have a different niche
to house my commitment,
a different way of using
my talents after forty years
on the road, endless talk
and wall-to-wall meetings.
I’ve moved to the back room
and write my message now.
And where are you now, Jimmy,
with eighty years beckoning
and your presidency far behind?
Does Jesus still burn brightly
as you head for your final hour?
’76 to ’80 were busy years, eh
Jimmy? A sort of riches to rags
story for both of us, eh Jimmy?
You got dumped after four years
and I got unemployed and back
in a psychiatric clinic, another
bottoming out before that long
climb to yet more years of service
and an exhaustion which contains
more peace than I have ever known.
Ron Price
22 November 2003 to 31 October 2011
WHY THE AMERICANS?
The year that the Kingdom of God on earth had its beginnings, 1953, American historian and writer Daniel J. Boorstin(1914-2004) published his The Genius of American Politics. A perusal of the contents of this book by this archtypal consensus historian reveals, to a certain extent anyway, why the USA serves as the model on which Baha’i Administration is based around the world. Boorstin sees Americans has having fundamentally the same political beliefs inspite of an apparent polarized party politics. There is a sense of givenness, of automatically defined beliefs, an identification of the “is” with the “ought.” Values and a theory of society are implicit in the facts about society according to Boorstin. Americans do not brood over historical alternatives to the given; they pursue both realizable and unrealizable dreams. There is an in-built utopianism in the USA. What can be built, ought to be built. Boorstin reveals the uniqueness and virtues of America just at the time when the Baha’i vision was being extended around the world. -Ron Price with thanks to Richard Reinitz,”Niebuhrian Irony and Historical Interpretation,” The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, editors, R. Canary and Henry Kozicki, the University of Wisconson Press, Madison, 1989, pp.103-110.
They’d been going at it for 16 years,
by then, by that auspicious year
when I was only nine
and they finished the Chicago temple.
That built-in utopianism,
that uniqueness would be
essential ingredients down
the long, tortuous and stoney road
toward realizable and unrealizable
dreams with only one result
in a golden age: the Most Great Peace
and its child—a world civilization.
Ron Price
28 August 2002
MANNING CLARK
Moving to Australia as I did in 1971 and living here for the last 40 years has inevitably brought me under the influence of Australian historians. The man who has influenced me more than any other is Manning Clark. He wrote that: "Everything a historian writes should be a celebration of life. A hymn of praise to life. It should come up from inside a man who knows all about that horror of the darkness when a man returns to the dust from whence he came. Of a man who's looked into the heart of a great darkness. that has seen and felt both a tenderness for everyone and yet paradoxically a melancholy, a sadness and a compassion, because he realises that what matters most in life is never likely to happen." Manning Clark also wrote that: "I want to show that a knowledge of the history of Australia can help a person to find the answers to the great problems of life. I want to show how the discovery of Australia threw light on all the things that had puzzled and bewildered me in life. I know you will be sceptical about this claim that a man can find out anything about life by a journey into the past. I'm aware of the stern warning about historians by Lev Tolstoy; namely, that historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no-one's asked them. And all I can say in reply to that is that all human beings have to find the way in which the world becomes intelligible and bearable to them. Human beings find their answers in all sorts of ways. Life is immense. I happen to be one of those who find answers to these deeper questions about life by knowing more about the past."
For an interview about him and his ideas go to the following link:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigidea/stories/
MY APPROACH TO HISTORY
In my approach to the study of history I have chosen pluralism, the embrace of multiple subjects, methods, & truths, rather than fragmentation, the flight to small islands of certainty. Many historians reacted to the end of faith in overall explanations by becoming experts in a narrow or specialized subject. I accept the irreducible variety within history, and seek to embrace difference within an account that is harmonious, convincing, and true. I do not write with any particular authority about economics, society, politics, and culture. I grant the value of specialization but I have never been able to master the huge literatures of these fields, to which I would like to impart grace and unity. There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of polemical intellectuals who deal with history. There are those for whom the taking of controversial positions is primarily a matter of personal peacock display, factional or clique positioning, hidden agendas, score-settling, or serial, knee-jerk revisionism. Then there are those who, while not without personal motivations and biases, are fundamentally concerned with seeking the truth. I see myself in the latter category, although it is difficult not to occasionally slip into the former.
Some links in cyberspace on history. The first is a history of genocide and the second is a four volume history of women:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/apr/17/man-slaughters-man/
1. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/apr/30/the-war-against-women/
