New Jersey

In 1858, a lawyer named William Parker Foulke sat down to dinner at a farmhouse in Haddonfield, New Jersey. His host showed him some giant bones he'd dug up on his farm 20 years earlier.

Foulke started digging and unearthed the first nearly complete dinosaur skeleton ever found in the world. Scientists named it Hadrosaurus foulkii, a 25-foot-long, duck-billed plant eater that lived about 80 million years ago.

In 1868, that skeleton became the first dinosaur ever mounted for public display. Tens of thousands of people lined up at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia to see it. Modern dinosaur mania started right here in a New Jersey backyard.

The Lenape people lived across this land for thousands of years before Europeans arrived. Dutch settlers came first in the early 1600s. The English took over in 1664 and named the colony after the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel.

New Jersey earned its nickname "Crossroads of the Revolution" the hard way. Caught between the British stronghold in New York and the rebel capital in Philadelphia, the state saw more than 600 battles and skirmishes during the war, more than any other colony.

On Christmas night 1776, George Washington crossed the icy Delaware River and surprised Hessian troops at Trenton. It was one of the war's most important victories, and it came when the Revolution was close to falling apart.

After the war, New Jersey became the third state to approve the Constitution in 1787 and the first to ratify the Bill of Rights in 1789. Thomas Edison later set up his "invention factory" at Menlo Park, where his team developed the phonograph in 1877 and the practical light bulb in 1879.

You can visit the Hadrosaurus discovery site in Haddonfield, where a bronze statue of the dinosaur stands downtown. Walk the grounds at Washington Crossing State Park where the famous river crossing began.

Tour Thomas Edison's laboratory at the National Historical Park in West Orange. Down the shore, stroll the Atlantic City Boardwalk, the world's first, built in 1870.