The Murray County Historical Society invites the public to attend its February Dinehart Lunchbox Lecture on Thursday, Feb. 10, starting at noon. This month’s lecture will be presented by Southwest Minnesota State University Professor of History Dr. Jeff Kolnick talking about the San Lucas Toliman Mission in Guatemala and its connection to southwest Minnesota.

The lecture can be watched live in-person or online via Zoom. For the in-person option, the lecture will take place in the 4-H Building on the Murray County Fairgrounds in Slayton. The cost of the talk is $3 per person or Historical Society members get in free. Attendees are welcome to bring their own lunch and beverages are provided. Facemasks are highly encouraged. For the Zoom option, the log-in information will be available on our website at: www.murraycountyhistoricalsociety.org and on the society’s Facebook page. The lecture will not be recorded.

Dr. Kolnick has written and studied about 19th century Minnesota history and the Civil Rights Movement of the mid-20th century. In 1999, he met his wife Rosa, a native of Guatemala. That inspired him to begin a study that linked his passion for Minnesota history with his newfound love of Guatemala. The vehicle for that new interest was the San Lucas Toliman Mission in Guatemala. Founded by Minnesotan and Marshall parish priest, the Rev. Greg Schaffer, the San Lucas Mission has impacted the lives of countless Guatemalans and many hundreds of Minnesotans. In this brief talk, Kolnick will set out how the work of Schaffer and his many supporters tended to the spiritual lives of desperately poor Guatemalans by working to improve their economic status while ministering to the spiritual needs of relatively comfortable southwest Minnesotans by exposing them to the deep spiritual practices of Guatemalan Catholics while working on a variety of labor projects at the Mission.

Dr. Kolnick has taught at SMSU since 1992 with a focus on the history of the United States and research interests in rural and agricultural history, labor history, political history, U.S. foreign policy, and African American history. In 1997, he helped found the Fannie Lou Hamer National Institute on Citizenship and Democracy. His work with the Hamer Institute has been central to winning a five-year Teaching American History Grant from the U.S. Department of Education and 10 National Endowment for the Humanities awards to conduct summer institutes and workshops for K-12 teachers and community college and university faculty. Kolnick has also been a fellow to the Salzburg Seminar and to the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Harvard University.

If you missed the November-January Lunchbox Lectures, the recordings are still viewable on the society’s Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/murraycountymuseum under the “Videos” tab. For more information about this and other museum events, contact the Murray County Historical Museum at 507-836-6533 or museum@co.murray.mn.us.