Ursula Lamb

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Ursula Schäfer Lamb (born, Essen Germany 15 January 1914, died, Tucson, Arizona, 8 August 1996) was a distinguished American historian specializing in Latin American history, who published works on the age of exploration and the history of science.[1][2][3] She was a pioneering female academic in Latin American history, whose interdisciplinary works on the history of science and globalization antedate the recent boom in such studies.[4]

Life and academic career

Lamb was born just before the outbreak of World War I in Germany and came of age in the interwar years. She attended the

Herbert E. Bolton. She earned her M.A. in 1937 and Ph.D. in 1949.[6] The topic of her master's thesis was "Americanization of the Forty-Eighters, 1848-1860," and her doctoral dissertation topic was "Nicolás de Ovando
, comendador mayor of Alcántara and governor of the Indies."

Due to prejudices against women in the era, Lamb was "prevented from pursuing her first choices in an academic career." But her difficulties in the U.S. were compounded by her being designated an "enemy alien." Despite her 1939 marriage to a U.S. citizen, distinguished physicist Willis Lamb, who later won a Nobel prize, she could not live within 50 miles of the coast.[7] She completed her dissertation on Nicolás de Ovando in 1949.

She taught at

Oxford University (1959–60), Yale University (1961–1974), and then University of Arizona (1974–84), where she retired in 1984. It was not until she was at University of Arizona that she held a tenured professorial position.[8]

In 1990, she was recognized by the Conference on Latin American History Distinguished Service Award, its highest honor. She was the first woman to receive it. The Hispanic American Historical Review took the unusual action of publishing two obituaries of her in the year following her death, with the editor noting that the journal “is pleased to offer its readers another look into the life of a pioneer among women in the field of Latin American history.”[9] She died of cancer in 1996, survived by her husband of 57 years. An obituary notes that she did not consider herself a feminist, but “she recognized the need for female scholars to be treated as equals.” In her personal life she made a commitment “as a supportive wife to nurture another’s genius.” [10]

Works

  • Frey Nicolás de Ovando, Gobernador de las Indias 1501–1509 (1956)
  • Science by Litigation: A Cosmographer's Feud (1969)
  • The Quarti Partita en Cosmographia by Alonso de Cháves: An Interpretation (1969)
  • Martín Fernández de Navarrete clears the deck: The Spanish Hydrographic Office 1802–24 (1980)
  • Cosmographies and Pilots of the Spanish Maritime Empire (1995)
  • The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed, editor (1995), which includes contributions by
    A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Wilcomb E. Washburn

Honors

Further reading

ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9
, pp. 1‒52.

References

  1. ^ Martin Torodash, "Ursula Lamb (1914-1996)". The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 77, No. 2 (May 1997), pp. 281-282.
  2. ^ Susan M. Deeds and Donna J. Guy, "Ursula Lamb (1914-1996)". The Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 77, No. 4 (Nov. 1997), pp. 677-679
  3. ^ http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/90/1/16_1_m.html Archived 2015-04-05 at archive.today accessed 5 July 2016.
  4. ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9
    , pp. 12, 34, 36, 390‒391 (including a short biography and bibliography).
  5. ^ Deeds and Guy, "Ursula Lamb", p. 677.
  6. ^ "Lamb, Ursula Schaefer," in Historians of Latin America in the United States, 1965: Biobibliographies of 680 Specialists. Ed. Howard F. Cline. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966, 53.
  7. ^ Deeds and Guy, "Ursula Lamb", pp. 677-78.
  8. ^ Deeds and Guy, “Ursula Lamb”, p. 678.
  9. ^ Editor’s note, HAHR, vol. 77, No. 4 (Nov. 1997), p. 677.
  10. ^ Deeds and Guy, “Ursula Lamb” p. 679.
  11. ^ "CLAH » the Distinguished Service Award".
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