Dale Mize

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!

In Minneapolis, Spectacular Cruelty Meets Authentic Community  | Essay A Historian of Democracy Shows How His City's Organizing Empowered Their Response to ICE

www.zocalopublicsquare.org/in-minneapol...

Powerful piece written by Historian Michael Lansing. Be sure to give it a read.

My next exhibit project is coming to @spurlockmuseum.bsky.social soon! Be sure to check it out while it’s up: www.spurlock.illinois.edu/exhibits/pro...

The majority of archival material out there has NOT been digitized.

So if you really want to figure something out, odds are that you have to go to an archive and dig.

Historians are trained to dig.

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!

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

Wow - what a powerful read!

This is so cool! Can’t wait to hear more about how it goes.

I was able to! The look on the poor student workers face when I brought three big bags of books back to them was priceless. I said “now imagine having to read them all” 🤣

Thanks Josh!

Thank you! My list included a good mix of the new and the classics, and included A Companion to American Environmental History too!

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! 🥳

The steaks of archival research | Department of History | Illinois Graduate student Dale Mize explores beefy history

Blog post about my summer research trip: history.illinois.edu/news/2025-09...

WARNING: I love a good a pun

Come see @dalemize.bsky.social’s and my new exhibit!!!

Found a needle in a haystack plane ticket for WHA (MUCH cheaper than any other tickets I was finding). I’m taking that as a good omen that my first prelim exam will go swimmingly in a few weeks.

“…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!

“…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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

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

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

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!

#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

‘Rainbow Reflections’ makes LGBTQ+ history tangible in the Spurlock Museum’s first-ever Pride exhibit - IPM Newsroom The exhibit, curated by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Ph.D. student Dale Mize, features a collection of objects representing queer history from Champaign-Urbana and around the world.

Check out this article written about an exhibit I curated at the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures here in Urbana-Champaign! ipmnewsroom.org/rainbow-refl...

#4

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

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

#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