In this lecture from Yale's DeVane course America at 250: A History, Professor Joanne Freeman explains the role individual states played within the developing American Experiment following independence. Recorded in Yale's Battell Chapel as part of this one-time-only course on United States history from the 1770s forward, the session examines competing visions of how much authority should rest with the states versus a central government in the earliest years of the republic. It continues Freeman's sequence of lectures, building toward the following class's focus on the drafting of the Constitution.