Alabama

Guess what? New Orleans didn't throw the first Mardi Gras party in America. Mobile, Alabama did, way back in 1703. That's 15 years before New Orleans even existed as a city. So yeah, Alabama got there first.

Alabama has been at the center of some of the biggest moments in American history. Montgomery became the first capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War in 1861. But that same city later became the place where people stood up and fought for equal rights for all Americans.

In 1955, a brave woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery. Her arrest kicked off a massive protest called the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and a young pastor named Martin Luther King Jr. led the charge.

In 1965, marchers in Selma crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge demanding the right to vote. Police attacked them on live television, and the whole country watched. That terrible day, called Bloody Sunday, helped change the law so all Americans could vote.

Alabama also played an important part in the space race. Scientists in Huntsville built the Saturn V, the giant rocket that launched the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. This state went from growing cotton to building spaceships.

In Birmingham, you can visit the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Civil Rights Institute right next door. You'll see real photographs, walk through a replica jail cell, and sit at the same kind of lunch counter where protesters bravely sat during the 1960s. It brings history off the textbook page and puts it right in front of you.

Over in Huntsville, the U.S. Space and Rocket Center lets you touch actual moon rocks and stand under a real Saturn V rocket hanging above your head. Down in Mobile, climb aboard the massive USS Alabama battleship and if you visit at the right time, catch America's original Mardi Gras parade rolling through the streets. Then hop over to Fairhope, grab hot beignets at Panini Pete's, and walk off the powdered sugar along the bluffs overlooking Mobile Bay.