variables being emptied when brought into jquery

I am setting a variable on page load using

var lastVal;
var totHistory=0;
var positions = new Array();
function addHistory(obj){
   totHistory++;
   positions.push(obj.id);
}

when I try to access totHistory within jquery it returns to zero. I can confirm that totHistoy has a value using console.log outside of jquery function but it goes away within. How can I solve this?

$(function() {
lastVal = totHistory;
    $("#slider").slider({
    animate: true,
min: 1,
max: totHistory,
value:totHistory
slide: function(event, ui) {
    if(lastVal>ui.value)
        $(buildQ(lastV开发者_JAVA技巧al,ui.value)).hide('fast').find('.addComment').remove();
    else if(lastVal<ui.value)
        $(buildQ(lastVal,ui.value)).show('fast');
    lastVal = ui.value;
}
});
});

My guess is that your

addHistory({id : "28"})

is called on body onload event. But the function passed to jQuery ($) is called on DOMReady which gets fired before onload. So, that function always sees the totHistory value as zero.