Bio
Early America draws Jake Ruddiman as a teacher and historian because it stands as a hinge between eras. It mixes the familiar and foreign, mythic and controversial, foundational and revolutionary. The era’s actors point us towards questions of human experience: how did people build lives, communities, and meaning? And the American Revolution – boldly begun but never quite finished – pushes us to engage with its triumphs and failures, demanding we challenge ourselves to seek what still remains to be done.
His first book, Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War (2014), explores the lives of young men in the Continental army. That project has led to essays on Samuel Shaw, the first American consul at Canton, and on Traugott Bagge, merchant and impromptu historian of the Moravians at Salem, North Carolina.
Jake’s current research examines soldiers’ travel writing during the War of American Independence to explore the place of slavery and race in the Revolution. These texts from white and black Americans, Britons, Hessians, and French aristocrats illustrate diverse and changing relationships among enslaved people and American and European combatants.
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.
Background
Education
Ph.D. Yale University 2010
M.A., M.Phil. Yale University 2004
B.A. Princeton University 2000
Academic Appointments
Wake Forest University. Associate Professor 2016 – Present
Wake Forest University. Assistant Professor 2010 – 2016
- HST 108 Americas and the World Come explore how the movement of people and the creation of new communities, cultures, and identities has marked the history of the Americas. We examine the catastrophically disruptive Columbian exchange, colonization and the first globalization, the explosion of slavery and the rise of abolition, the age of revolutions, and the contested ideas of citizenship and liberty up to our own generation.
- HST 258 Colonial America Columbus’s discovery of “another world” reconnected human communities that had been divided for millennia. In this course, 16th and 17th century North America provides a historical laboratory in which we compare the mixing of peoples, the creation of new societies, and the rise of new empires. Most importantly, we explore the ways in which Indian peoples, West Africans, and Europeans created new worlds for all.
- HST 259 Revolutionary America This course examines indigenous and colonial experiences resisting — and collaborating with — empires in eighteenth century North America. We largely follow the course of Benjamin Franklin’s long life (b. 1706), considering the economic and social maturation of British colonies, the imperial wars that reshaped the Atlantic, and the political and military resistance to imperial control. This course examines the mentalities and actions of both rebellious and loyal colonial men and women, the experiences among the elite, middling, and lower ranks of society, and the choices made by Native American nations and enslaved African-Americans. This broad frame reveals the complicated nature of this nation’s founding, as well as what that generation achieved and failed to complete.
- HST 353 The War of American Independence This course uses the American Revolutionary War to examine the interaction of political ideas, social forces, and military experiences within the American Revolution. Students explore how experiences and justifications of violence shaped identity, government, and race in America.
- HST 354 The Early American Republic This course examines the foundational transformation of U. S. politics and society in the generation after 1776. After the Revolution, Americans embarked on a purposeful and anxious journey of self-creation. The challenges of new republican constitutions and governments loomed large, but this process also touched religious beliefs, gender and the family, race and slavery, and their economies and international affairs. In addition to the new constitutions and governments, we consider how duels, newspapers, wars, slavery, and frontier conflicts shaped new expectations for politics, national identity, and culture.
- First Year Seminar: Early American Stories Students in this seminar examine popular retellings of early American history. We will weigh the choices artists and storytellers make that shape their presentations of the past, the political and intellectual implications of their stories, and scholars’ inquiries and debates about these works. The course approaches “colonial stories,” “revolution stories,” and “slavery stories” across genres of fiction, theater, and film. These artistic and fictional presentations of the past offer opportunities to examine the interactions between past and present, political power and culture, and history as an intellectual discipline.
- Is This the Land of Liberty? Soldiers Seeing Slavery in the American Revolution [book manuscript in progress]
- Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).
- “I am a Man and a Warrier:” George Rogers Clark and the Gendered Politics of the Illinois Campaign” in The American Revolution on the Frontier [forthcoming, University of Virginia Press, 2024]
- “Traugott Bagge as a Historian of the American Revolution” in Moravian Americans and their Neighbors, 1772-182, edited by Ulrike Wiethaus and Grant P. McAllister (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2023), 137-150.
- “Is This the Land of Liberty? Continental Soldiers and Slavery in the Revolutionary South.” William and Mary Quarterly 79:2 (April 2022), 283-314.
- “Samuel Shaw’s ‘Mercantile Silk Road’ from American Independence towards Monopoly, 1784-1794” in The Silk Roads: from Local Realities to Global Narratives edited by Jeffrey D. Lerner and Yaohua Shi (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2020), 285-297.
- Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War. University of Virginia Press, 2014.
- “A Record in the Hands of Thousands: Power and Negotiation in the Orderly Books of the Continental Army.” William and Mary Quarterly 67:4 (October 2010), 747-774.