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J EFF K OLNICK , P H .D.
Historian Southwest Minnesota State University
J
eff Kolnick, a founding member of the Hamer Institute has been teaching history at Southwest Minnesota State University since 1992. He began his studies at Fullerton Community College where he became a historian under the patient guidance of Phil Snyder. Snyder introduced the teenage Kolnick to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a fateful event in his intellectual development. By the time he left FCC, Kolnick had developed an interest in African American history and environmental politics. Eventually he transferred to UCLA where he continued his studies in history and deepened his knowledge of African American history by working with Margaret Washington as an undergraduate and then a graduate student. While at UCLA, he developed a keen interest in labor history and his environmental politics morphed into a romantic focus on agricultural history. After receiving his MA in history and beginning his studies for a Ph.D., Kolnick transferred to UC Davis where he earned his Ph.D. by writing a social history of the farmer labor collations in Blue Earth County Minnesota at the end of the 19th century. At Davis, Kolnick learned something of Latin America from Arnold Bauer, really dove into labor and agriculture history with David Brody and Morton Rothstein, and continued his study of African American history under Clarence Walker and Daniel Calhoun who was Margaret Washington’s major professor when she attended UC Davis. In 1992, Kolnick secured a job at Southwest Minnesota State University and went from studying farmers to living among them. Shortly after receiving tenure, he was admitted to the famous NEH Institute on Teaching the History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement at Harvard University. Placed in the Labor and Community Organizing Group with the rest of the founding members of the Hamer Institute, his life has never been the same since. As a founding member of the Hamer Institute Kolnick has played a role in much of the work that has gone on, and in the early years, he was involved in almost everything. Kolnick had a hand in drafting all of the initial documents and participated in all of the early workshops and activities. After the departure of founding member Marty Bennett, Kolnick took on the role as the group’s main labor historian and he has presented on nexus of labor and civil rights in the lives of Walter Reuther and Dr. Martin Luther King. Over the years, Kolnick’s presentations have included topics such as Caribbean Slavery, Reconstruction, The West, The Revolution, The Civil War, Immigration and Industrialization, The Great Migration, Race and 19th Century America, and workshops on using primary documents. He has been a participant and helped to plan many Hamer Institute programs, including all forms of our workshops and the Hamer Lecture Series. He has played a role in writing several grants and has cooked numerous dinners for the team. Through the Hamer Institute, Kolnick took his first trip to Europe where he represented the institute at the Salzburg Seminar. There he met his bride, Rosa Tock in 1999. Indeed, it can be said with total confidence that the Hamer Institute has shaped and enhanced most of Kolnick’s professional career and mightily improved his personal life. In 1997, Kolnick entered into a partnership and with his colleagues, Leslie McLemore, Michelle Deardorff, and Thandi Mvusi. Since that time he has been allowed to help shape an institution that has done some good by sharing the story of how ordinary people who commit to struggle can change the world if they work together in a spirit of love and creative, thoughtful, discipline. It has been a privilege and it remains quite a ride.