Richard Schwartz

Richard Schwartz is an award-winning Bay Area historian, author, lecturer, and independent researcher whose work focuses on the history and archaeology of Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area.

In 2026, he received the Presidential Recognition Award from the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), an international organization representing archaeologists throughout North, Central, and South America, in recognition of his decades of work researching, documenting, and preserving archaeological and historical sites in the Bay Area.

Schwartz is the author of Berkeley 1900, Earthquake Exodus, 1906, The Circle of Stones, and The Man Who Lit Lady Liberty, which received a Bronze Medal in the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards. An Affiliated Research Scholar with UC Berkeley’s Joseph A. Myers Center, he lives in Berkeley, California.