In this session of Yale's DeVane course America at 250: A History, Professor Joanne Freeman begins her section on what the course calls the American Experiment, recorded in Yale's Battell Chapel. Freeman examines the founding period with attention to which elements of the American Revolution were genuinely transformative and which preserved existing social and political structures. The lecture opens Freeman's portion of this one-time-only course, which traces United States history from the 1770s forward, and sets up her subsequent classes on independence and constitutional formation by first questioning how revolutionary the founding era actually was.