Paul Buhle graduated from the University of Illinois in 1966, where he had been a spokesperson for the chapter of Students for a Democratic Society's antiwar activities. He received a Master's degree from the University of Connecticut (in 1967) and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin—Madison (in 1975). He had been active in the civil rights movement in SDS, and a member for some months of the Socialist Labor Party. In 2006-07, he was one of the founding figures of the new Students for a Democratic Society, and more recently a leader of the Movement for a Democratic Society.

Buhle was founding editor of the journal Radical America (1967—1999), an unofficial organ of Students for a Democratic Society, founder of Cultural Correspondence (1977—83), a journal of popular culture studies, and founder and director of the Oral History of the American Left archive at New York University in 1976. In Rhode Island, he co-founded the Rhode Island Labor History Society, was active in labor history and labor support activities and produced several popular histories of the state's labor movement. He also produced Vanishing Rhode Island, a pictorial history and plea for preservation; and with his students, Underground Rhode Island.' He has contributed frequently to the journals and newspapers The Nation, The Village Voice, Monthly Review, Jewish Currents, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The San Francisco Chronicle.

Buhle is the co-author of four books on the history of the Hollywood Blacklist and the editor of a series of graphic non-fiction works by American comics artists and writers, among them Harvey Pekar, Sabrina Jones and Sharon Rudahl.

Buhle taught at the Cambridge-Godard Graduate School, 1971—73 and lectured at the Rhode Island School of Design until accepting an appointment as Lecturer in History and American Civilization at Brown University in 1995. In 1982-'83 he created an archive at the Tamiment Library, New York University, on the Oral History of the American Left, with associated research on ethnic radicalism. He has served on the Board of the Minnesota Review, as Contributing Editor to Tikkun magazine, and on the editorial advisory board on Radical Americas (an on-line publication of MDS). He has also been a sponsor of New Politics and an advisor on documentary biographies of Howard Zinn, comic artist Will Eisner, and the labor martyrs Sacco and Vanzetti, and served as historian for the radio series Grandma was an Activist in the 1980s.

Books

• Co-author, with Howard Zinn and Mike Konopacki of A People's History of American Empire (2008),
• Editor, Che Guevara, a Graphic Biography (2008)
• Editor, Jews and American Popular Culture, 3 volumes (2007)
• Author, Tim Hector, Caribbean Radical (2006)
• Co-editor, Wobblies! A Graphic history of the Industrial Workers of the World (2005)
• Co-editor, The New Left Revisited (2004)
• Co-author, Hide in Plain Sight, the Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002 (2003)
• Co-author, Radical Hollywood (2001)
• Co-author, A Very Dangerous Citizen, Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left (1999)
• Co-editor, Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990 and 1998)
• Co-author, The Tragedy of Empire: A biography of William Appleman Williams (1995)
• Author, The Artist as Revolutionary, C.L.R. James (1988)
• Author, Marxism in the United States (1987)

Articles

• " E.P. Thompson and his Critics ". TELOS 49 (Fall 1981). New York: Telos Press