His first book, Becoming Men of Some Consequence (2014) examines the lives and choices of young men in the military maelstrom of the American Revolution. His current research explores the Revolutionary era in the Southeast and he is completing a project that examines the place of slavery and enslaved people in soldiers’ travel writing during the War of American Independence. Ruddiman has been drawn to Early America as a teacher and historian because it stands as a hinge between eras, mixing the familiar and foreign, the mythic with controversial.