John Ruddiman is an Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University. His 2014 book, Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War, explores the lives and choices of young men in the Continental army. His current research explores the place of slavery in soldiers’ travel writing during the War of American Independence and the diverse relationships among American and European soldiers and enslaved people. Across these projects, his work as a historian of Revolutionary America explores how people built their lives, reshaped their communities, and constructed meaning for themselves and for posterity.
Late in his life, after retiring the presidency, James Monroe drafted his own history. He was still struck, five decades after the War for Independence, by the “high character of that epoch and of those in whose hands its destiny fell.” He looked back and saw that war as “a school of practical instruction . […]
