| Description |
Dr. Elihu S. McIntire (1832â€"1899) grew up on farms in Ohio and Indiana and was a physician who served as an assistant surgeon with the 78th Illinois Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. He practiced briefly in Dallas City, Illinois, and Grantsburg, Crawford County, Indiana, before settling in Mitchell, Lawrence County, Indiana, where he spent the last 30-plus years of his life. He served as editor and proprietor of the Mitchell (IN) Commercial from 1872 to 1883. This dissertation in the form of a cultural biography traces his life story based on 13 personal diaries and more than 100 issues of the Commercial that have survived to the present day. It applies James Carey’s approach to cultural history in attempting to capture the “way in which men in the past have grasped reality,†“how action made sense from the standpoint of historical actors,†and the “structure of feeling†that existed in McIntire’s time and place. It attempts to paint McIntire as a real person, considering both his fine points and flaws in the many roles he fulfilled as husband, father, doctor, journalist, and citizen. This dissertation identifies how McIntire’s life experiences shaped his journalism and how the practice of his craft later influenced his declining years. It also uses framing and textual silences as analytical tools to consider how McIntire himself, his contemporaries, and this biographer employed these two devices in the telling of McIntire’s story. It also argues that framing and textual silences cannot be studied or employed independently of each other and suggests that they can be combined in historiography generally and in cultural biography specifically. |
