Joseph E. Schwartzberg (February 5, 1928 – September 19, 2018) was an American writer, peace activist, and a world federalist, who was a tenured professor at the University of Minnesota. Author of numerous books, he was the editor and principal author of the Historical Atlas of South Asia, which in 1980 won the Watumull Prize of the American Historical Association. In 1984 the American Association of Geographers honored him with their annual award. His several substantial chapters in Book One of Volume Two of The History of Cartography were instrumental in that work receiving the R. R. Hawkins Award for Best Scholarly Book for 1992 from the Association of American Publishers. He served on the board of directors of the World Federalist Association, has chaired its Policy and Issues Commission, and is President of the Minnesota chapter of Citizens for Global Solutions.
Biography
Early life
Born in Brooklyn, New York on February 5, 1928, Schwartzberg was the second of four children of Philip and Frances Schwartzberg. He, his older brother and two younger sisters were born within a span of less than six years. All six members of the family participated in the operation of their small clothing store. They lived in two rooms behind the store during the bad years of the depression and in an apartment immediately above it when times were good. Schwartzberg graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in 1945 and in 1949 from Brooklyn College (cum laude), where he majored in geology. For parts of three summers during his high school years he worked on farms to aid the war effort; but, as the war drew to a close in the summer of 1945, he hitchhiked to and through Mexico, as far as the Pacific coast town of Acapulco. In college he joined and ultimately became president of a then rare inter-racial service fraternity.
Shortly after earning his B.A, Schwartzberg took a position as a geographer with the Map Intelligence Branch of the U.S. Army Map Service in a suburb of Washington, D.C. and simultaneously worked for his M.A. at the University of Maryland. His master's thesis, Old Order Amish and Stauffer Mennonite Communities in Southern Maryland, was based on field research among the communities named. This work instilled in him a love of fieldwork and an abiding interest in "plain people" and, more generally, in communities with life styles deviating from established norms. Around the same time, through Washington's First Unitarian Church, he became familiar with the then burgeoning World Federalist movement. He has maintained his allegiance to the "one world" ideal ever since.
Following the outbreak of war in Korea, Schwartzberg was drafted into the U.S. Army. Although he anticipated that he would be sent to Korea immediately on conclusion of his infantry basic training, he was assigned instead to a topographic engineering battalion headquartered in the Presidio of San Francisco. After nine months in that unit he accepted a commission as a 2nd lieutenant and was transferred to Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he trained for work in a newly created terrain intelligence unit that was dispatched to Heidelberg, Germany in December 1952. His duties entailed extensive travel in Germany and many opportunities to improve his language skills.
Conclusion of the Korean War led to a major reduction of the pool of junior army officers, enabling Schwartzberg, by then a 1st lieutenant, to accept an early overseas discharge. Thus began a period of nearly three additional years of foreign travel and residence. This period included four months in Seville, Spain (then still under the rule of Franco) in early 1953; eight months in Paris in 1953–54, studying French language and civilization at the Sorbonne (courtesy of the G.I. Bill of Rights); travels in many other parts of Europe; a month in Israel; brief sojourns in many Islamic nations in North Africa and the Middle East; a half-year touring India and other countries of South Asia (marked by visits at a number of Gandhian ashrams and government-managed community development projects; and by the start of a decades-long friendship with an itinerant holy man [sadhu]); several months in Southeast Asia; and a month in Japan.
During his stay in Paris, Schwartzberg drew up a rough draft of a World Constitution, many of whose ideas were incorporated in articles and books published decades later. His federalist thinking was reinforced by his experience in India, the world's most populous federal polity. Considering that, despite its many serious problems, meager resources and incredibly diverse population, India was able to maintain a viable democracy convinced him that a federalized world, with vastly greater resources, could do so as well.