Belden Paulson was born on June 29, 1927 in Chicago, Illinois. He received a B.A. from Oberlin College (1950) and a M.A. (1955) from the University of Chicago. Paulson worked as a relief worker in Italy and from 1959 to 1961 served as Special Consultant to the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees in Rome. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1962 with a Ph.D. in political science. His dissertation on Italian Communist community politics was entitled Revolution in the Villages of Southern Italy. In 1962 Paulson became an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He helped start the Center for Urban Community Development at the University of Wisconsin-Extension in 1967. In the early 1970s he moved from the Department of Political Science to the Center for Urban Community Development and served as its chair. In the early 1980s Paulson co-founded Goals for Greater Milwaukee 2000, a citizen organization whose objective was to improve the quality of life for citizens of Greater Milwaukee through community planning. After the end of the 1995-1996 school year, Paulson retired from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Significant biographical information provided by Paulson is located in series 1 and in the case file in the Archives.