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Joseph Ewan

American botanist (1909–1999)

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ3184495 ↗
Source-derived summary

Joseph Andorfer Ewan (1909–1999) was an American botanist, naturalist, and historian of botany and natural history.

Biography

Joseph Ewan grew up in Los Angeles and developed an early interest in the study of nature. At the age of eighteen, he published an ornithological report in The Condor. He matriculated at UCLA and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley in 1933, graduating there with a B.A. in 1934. After graduating he remained at Berkeley until 1937 as a research assistant to Willis Jepson. In 1935 Ewan married a fellow botanical student, Ada Nesta Dunn (1908–2000), in Reno, Nevada. She often collaborated with him on their publications. He was from 1937 to 1944 an instructor at the University of Colorado, from 1944 to 1945 a botanist with the Foreign Economic Administration, from 1945 to 1946 an assistant curator at the Smithsonian Institution, and from 1946 to 1947 an associate botanist at the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry. At Tulane University he became in 1947 an assistant professor and was eventually promoted to associate professor, and then full professor. There he held the Ida Richard Professorship from 1972 to 1977, when he retired as professor emeritus.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Joseph Ewan” is american botanist (1909–1999). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Joseph, Ewan and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1909, 1999, 1933, 1934—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1909-10-24. For this dossier, Joseph, Ewan and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american botanist (1909–1999)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3184495. VIAF identifies the subject as 71565733. The Library of Congress control number is n50010893. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1909, 1999, 1933 and 1934.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Joseph Ewan primary sources, Joseph Ewan archive and Joseph research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Ewan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.