[2] The Ruvarac family settled in Syrmia in Austria-Hungary, today's Serbia, from the region between Bihać and Cazin, nowadays Bosnia and Herzegovina, then Ottoman Empire.

[5] While a student in Vienna, Ruvarac became involved with a social circle of prominent South Slavic intellectuals, such as the philologists Vuk Karadžić and Đuro Daničić, who gathered at the famous café Slavisches Kafeehaus.

In early 1880 he was commissioned to report on the state of education among Serbs in Austria-Hungary, and his able performance of this task brought him an offer of the bishopric of Karlovci, which he declined.

[10] He used scientific approaches to refute many deeply rooted and beloved legends, traditions about the treachery of Vuk Branković, the eternal freedom of Montenegro, and the death of Tsar Stefan Uroš V at the alleged hands of Vukašin Mrnjavčević.

Ruvarac exposed many Montenegrin fables that some wished to palm off as historical facts—either for personal, political gain, dynastic reasons (Habsburgs, Vatican, Ottomans), or simply to flatter their own vanity.

[citation needed] Most of Ruvarac's career was spent struggling with national myths which distorted the historical truth, but there was no turning back after him, since he inspired other historians to investigate the past with a critical eye.

The tradition of Ruvarac's scholarship and the critical method was carried on by Stojan Novaković (1842–1915), Ljubomir Kovačević (1848–1918), Mihailo Gavrilović, Stanoje Stanojević and many others.