iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

This morning I woke up to this email. As historians we don’t often get to experience the impact of our own work. I think any words I chose won’t express quite the impact I felt getting this. All I can say is: HISTORY MATTERS, MUSEUMS MATTER.

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

Graduate student appreciation week goes hard at the University of Illinois!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Advocating for the humanities in D.C. was an amazing experience. Hopefully I can come back one day soon! If you have a minute, please reach out to your congressmen/congresswomen and ask them to support robust funding for the NEH, the National Archives and Records Administration, and Title VI!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

Officially ABD! Successfully defended my dissertation proposal! Can’t wait to start writing soon!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Got some packages from printing yesterday! The exhibit I co-curated “Unfinished Revolutions: Living Stories of American Rights” goes up in just a few weeks!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 10/02/2026

Another one bites the dust! I am excited to have passed all my preliminary exams and look forward to my dissertation proposal defense in a few short weeks!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

In the craziness of the end of the semester I forgot to share a very exciting email I received a few weeks ago. I passed my US history since 1830 preliminary exam with distinction! Now on to the last exam and my dissertation proposal defense!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 18/10/2025

Grateful to win the WHA Graduate Student Prize at this year’s convention in Albuquerque, NM!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

Wow - what a powerful read!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

This was only half of the reading list, but thankfully they can all be put away today because I passed my major field prelim exam this morning! 🥳

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 21/08/2025

“…unburdened by the structures of modern environmental law, imprisoned workers helped turn an unbroken wilderness into a beehive of economic activity…” - @cjeffersonhall.bsky.social I loved this work, found it intriguing, and it is a timely read. I would highly recommend!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 10/08/2025

“…wilderness reveals itself to be not some primeval character of nature but rather an artifact of modernity, a concept employed by conservationists to naturalize the transformations taking place in rural America during the last nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” - Karl Jacoby

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

“Ever since John D. Rockefeller began to finance the massive restoration of Williamsburg during the 1920s and 1930s, ‘the world of American historic preservation has not been the same.’” - Arnold Alanen and Robert Melnick

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 02/08/2025

“It is not surprising that those whose economic and social interests depended on the continuing use of chemicals have a significant stake in asserting the uncertainty of the irrelevance of any connections between environment and health.” -Linda Nash

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

“The most crucial lesson of big box history is that these cinderblock-and-parking-lot edifices are a product of choice rather than fate and that the entrepreneurship that created them will also surely destroy the current system for on deemed more efficient.” -Shane Hamilton

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

“Making manure, more than any other single practice represented the intention and wherewithal of any farmer to remain on land presently cultivated.” -Steven Stoll

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 29/06/2025

Researches beef cattle all week, reads about dairy cattle on Saturday 😎 “What eaters put on the plate or pour in the glass embeds them within social and economic relationships, engages them in political contexts, and ties them to ecological processes.” - @kdsh.bsky.social

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

This one felt timely. Just in case anyone needs a 1960s refresher on inflation.

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

I’m a little jealous that this 9 year old could draw better than I can at 25

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

First day of two weeks at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming in Laramie! Already have found amazing materials in the first few hours! Can’t wait to continue exploring!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

#5 “Their sense of place was utopian and each group framed its vision in light of its own narrow vision of the past, often in blatantly self-serving terms…” - Matthew Klingle

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

#4 “Quitobaquito, then, is a lasagna of landscapes, one layered atop another.” - Jared Orsi

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Had a great time presenting at Ag History in St. Paul this week! Already looking forward to next year!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

#3 Complicated feelings about this one; though I enjoyed Mabel O. Wilson’s chapter titled “Race, Reason, and the Architecture of Jefferson’s Virginia Statehouse.” “Her experience was shaped far more by the landscape of slavery than by the architecture of democracy.” - Louis P. Nelson

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

Prelim Book #2 of the summer: “The realization that mahogany supplies were finite encouraged a ‘wild west’ mentality throughout the circum-Caribbean as people hastened to seize a one-time bounty.” - Jennifer Anderson

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

In an effort to give me some motivation as I read for prelims I’m going to try and remember to post books as I finish them with an accompanying favorite quote: “With each successive act of settling in an underdeveloped forest, homeowners destroy some portion of what they desire.” - Lincoln Bramwell

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Spent this week in the mountains sharing my current project and hearing about the work that my colleagues are doing too. The hikes were amazing, and so were the conversations. I came away excited to work on reading for prelims and beginning to write this summer!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

ASEH 2025 Pittsburgh edition was a great time! Got some great feedback on a side project I’ve been working on, and walked away with new ideas too. Excited to see everyone next year in Kansas City!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 13/03/2025

Excited that both roundtables I was asked to take part in were accepted for the Western History Association conference in October! See you all in Albuquerque!

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Dale Mize @dalemize.bsky.social · 16/05/2024

Recently I was selected as one of five humanities PhD students who will participate in UIUC’s Humanities Without Walls summer program! Check out more about the program and awardees here: www.humanitieswithoutwalls.illinois.edu/news/announc...

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