This paper reviews recent progress on ultrashort pulse generation with erbium-doped fiber ring lasers. The passive mode-locking technique of polarization additive pulse mode-locking (P-APM) is used to generate stable, self-starting, sub-500fs pulses at the fundamental repetition rate from aunidirectional fiber ring laser operating in the soliton regime. Saturation of the APM, spectral sideband generation, and intracavity filtering are discussed. Harmonic mode-locking of fiber ring lasers with soliton pulse compression is addressed, and stability regions for the solitons are mapped and compared with theoretical predictions. The stretched-pulse laser, which incorporates segments of positive- and negative-dispersion fiber into the P-APM fiber ring, generates shorter (sub-100fs) pulses with broader bandwidths (65nm) and higher pulse energies (up to 2.7nJ). We discuss optimization of the net dispersion of the stretched-pulse laser, use of the APM rejection port as the laser output port, and frequency doubling for amplifier seed applications. We also review the analytical theory of the stretched-pulse laser as well as discuss the excellent noise characteristics of both the soliton and stretched-pulse lasers.