Ursula Schaefer Lamb died on August 8, 1996, after a long and courageous battle with cancer. Born in Essen, in the Ruhr district of Germany, on January 15, 1914, she attended Kaiser Wilhelm University in Berlin (1933-35), where she was a staunch anti-Nazi; she was arrested for disrupting the speech of a Nazi official and was instrumental in helping Jewish families escape from Germany.
Ursula came to the United States as an exchange student at Smith College (1935-36). When she completed her year at Smith, she embarked on graduate studies under Herbert Eugene Bolton at the University of California at Berkeley, where she received her M.A. in 1939 and her Ph.D. in 1949 with a dissertation, “Nicolás de Ovando, Comendador Mayor of Alcántara and Governor of the Indies,” published as Frey Nicolás de Ovando, gobernador de las Indias (1501-1509) (Madrid, 1956).
Her academic career began at Barnard College, where she taught from 1943 to 1951. She was a tutor and lecturer at Brasenose College, Oxford (1959-60), and a research associate and lecturer, senior lecturer, and continuing lecturer at Yale University from 1961 to 1974. Her last academic post was as professor of history at the University of Arizona, from 1974 to 1984, when she retired as professor emerita. Ursula was the Eva G. R. Taylor lecturer, Royal Institute of Navigation, at the Royal Geographical Society in London on March 4, 1981, and was named an honorary member of Mortar Board in 1984. In 1990 she received the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History. She was the Jeannette Black Fellow at The John Carter Brown Library in 1984, a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Scholar (1972-73), a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow (1968-69), and the recipient of grants from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Science Foundation.
Professor Lamb was an active member of many academic professional organizations and societies in this country and abroad. She served as president of the Society for the History of Discoveries from 1975 to 1977 and associate editor of the HAHR from 1976 to 1980.
Her publications were numerous. In addition to her dissertation (which was published in a second edition in 1977), her translation of Pedro de Medina’s masterpiece was published as A Navigator’s Universe: The Libro de Cosmographía of 1538 by the University of Chicago Press in 1972. Her last book was Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire (1995). She also edited The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed, volume 3 of the series An Expanding World, 1400-1800 (1995). Professor Lamb was the author of more than a score of articles in both English and Spanish, many book reviews in this and other journals, and many papers presented at academic meetings and conferences.
Ursula was an accomplished linguist. She was at ease in most of the European languages, and she had a command of Arabic and Chinese. She was a distinguished scholar, a regal lady, a wonderful human being, and a dear friend. Willis E. Lamb, Jr., a Nobel Prize-winning physicist (1955), to whom she was married in 1939, survives her. Adios, querida amiga. Hasta que nos veamos de nuevo.
