Peter Linebaugh is an American Marxist historian who specializes in British history, Irish history, labor history, and the history of the colonial Atlantic. He is a member of the Midnight Notes Collective.
Peter Linebaugh was born in 1942. He was a student of British labor historian E. P. Thompson, and received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick in 1975. He has taught at University of Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts–Boston, Franconia College, Harvard University, and Tufts University. Linebaugh retired from the University of Toledo in 2014.
Linebaugh's books have been generally well received within the discipline of history, and several of his books have demonstrated popularity among general readers. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley praised Linebaugh's most recent book, arguing in a review of The Magna Carta Manifesto (2008) that there is "not a more important historian living today. Period."
In late April 2012, Occupy Ypsilanti published and began to distribute throughout Ypsilanti, Michigan, free of charge, Linebaugh's Ypsilanti Vampire May Day. The full text of the book is available online at CounterPunch, a journal to which Linebaugh is a frequent contributor. His writing also appears in New Left Review, the New York University Law Review, Radical History Review, and Social History.