Growing up in Virginia, I never had the sense that my state government really did anything of importance. In middle school and high school we studied the constitutional protections for state-level governance (something I suspect history classes in the south emphasized more than other schools), the ways in which states' rights were challenged in the mid-19th century (it took me a while to realize that what I was taught about the civil war was a little askew from the actual history), and then we were told that any semblance of state-level power had deteriorated across the 20th century.