Ursula Lamb (1914-1996)

In her last published work (“Argos and Polyphemus: Eyes on the New World Five Hundred Years Ago and Now,” in Cosmographers and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire, 1995) before her death on August 8, 1996, Ursula Schaefer Lamb was still engaged with the epistemological question that had guided her long and productive career: how one makes the leap from seeing something to knowing it. Like the cosmographers and explorers she studied, throughout her life she made inventive leaps across uncharted spaces in linking new discoveries to old notions.

Born in Essen, Germany, on January 15, 1914, Ursula Schaefer spent much of her childhood in Weimar with an extended family gifted in the musical and plastic arts. She went on to study the history of art at Kaiser Wilhelm University in Berlin from 1933 to 1935, just as Hitler consolidated power. Her family, alarmed by her activist opposition to the new regime and its persecution of Jews, persuaded her to leave for the United States in 1.935 with aid from Quakers. She studied at Smith College before going to Berkeley, where she received the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California in 1939 and 1949. There she discovered that her gender prevented her from pursuing her first choices in an academic career, landing her in Herbert E. Bolton’s seminar, where she became interested in the early history of Spain’s New World empire. Despite her marriage to a U.S. citizen, the noted physicist Willis Lamb, in 1939, Ursula faced a number of immigration challenges, not the least of which was her designation as an enemy alien, which forced her to leave Berkeley in 1941 because she could not live within 50 miles of the coast.

From her first book (Frey Nicolás de Ovando, Gobernador de las Indias, 1501-1509, 1956), she went on to apply her many linguistic skills to the history of discovery and science in the early modern period. While her professional pursuits were limited by personal commitments and although Yale University did not choose to offer her more than the rank of lecturer, from the 1950s to the 1970s she built a distinguished career as a historian of European expansion and colonial Latin America. Long before the recent afán for comparative and global perspectives in history, Ursula was already practicing them through her scholarship and her extensive contacts and multilingual correspondence with scholars of maritime and discovery history around the world: in England, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Chile. Her careful attention to detail, her breadth of context, and her fresh insights earned her the admiration of many leading historians.

Further recognition of her accomplishments accrued with grants from the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the John Carter Brown Library. In 1974, shortly after publishing a second book (A Navigator’s Universe: The Libro de Cosmographía of 1538, Pedro de Medina, 1972), she took up a post as professor of history at the University of Arizona. For the first time, Ursula was a full-fledged member of a department of history, and she took that opportunity to train many graduate and undergraduate students in the mysteries of the history of discovery and colonial Latin America. She also participated fully in the intellectual life of the department by hosting gatherings and attending reading groups on a wide variety of topics. Always ready to share her work with others, Ursula was also enthusiastic about critiquing her colleagues’ work when asked.

At the University of Arizona, Ursula also served as the associate editor of the HAHR from 1976 to 1980. She continued to play a significant role in the worldwide enterprise of the history of science. A principal member and president of the Society for the History of Discoveries from 1975 to 1977, she also served as the U.S. representative to international commissions on maritime history in 1977 and 1984 and as a member of the Committee for the Quincentennial of the Discovery of America in 1989.

Her impressive achievements were acknowledged in 1990 by Latin American historians when she received the CLAH Distinguished Service Award. By that time, she had been retired for more than five years, but she maintained an active research program, which culminated in 1995 with the publication by Variorum of two works: an anthology of her own work in Cosmographers and Pilots and an edited volume in the series The European Impact in World History: The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed. In all, she published four volumes and more than a score of articles. Active as a researcher to the end of her life, she also saw the need to reward creativity and excellence in the work of aspiring young scholars. One of her last requests was that a Senior Prize in History be established by the University of Arizona, with her funding but without her name, to recognize outstanding essays by senior history majors.

For those of us who worked with her, Ursula Lamb had many sides. She offered formidable challenges as a teacher, wisdom and encouragement as a mentor, pragmatism as a colleague, playfulness and a wry sense of humor as a friend. Although she did not consider herself to be a feminist, she was a pathfinder in a milieu that presented obstacles for women historians. Well-read in feminist novels and essays, she recognized the need for female scholars to be treated as equals. She developed special bonds with other female scholars like herself on the margins of the academic establishment in this country and abroad; refusing to be defeated by lack of recognition, without fanfare they chipped away at these barriers. In Ursula’s case, at least one barrier was self-imposed: her commitment as a supportive wife to nurture another’s genius. For herself, the option was “not to put the piñata too high or to fill it too full; just a little one would do.” To her dying day, she insisted that her friends honor that choice. The piñata turned out, of course, to be rather grand—the creation of a remarkable woman’s strong resolve and powerful intellect. It is a legacy that we shall cherish even as we miss the cheer of her companionship.

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