About New Jersey

New Jersey was named by Sir George Carteret, one of the two original proprietors who received the territory from the Duke of York in 1664, after the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, where Carteret had been born and where he had served as governor and military commander during the English Civil War. The island of Jersey had been one of the last royalist holdouts against the Parliamentarian forces, and Carteret had defended it heroically before eventually fleeing. Naming the new territory after his home island was both a sentimental gesture and a tribute to his loyalty to the Crown. New Jersey served as a critical battleground during the Revolutionary War, with more than 100 military engagements fought on its soil.

New Jersey is a study in contradictions. It is the most densely populated state in the nation, 9.3 million people packed into 8,723 square miles, yet it preserves 1.1 million acres of genuine wilderness in the Pine Barrens. It bears the nickname "The Garden State" while hosting the world's most concentrated pharmaceutical industry and the busiest port on the East Coast. It lies in the shadow of two of America's greatest cities, New York and Philadelphia, yet possesses a fierce and unmistakable identity entirely its own.

The state's strategic position between the Hudson and Delaware rivers made it the central battleground of the American Revolution and the laboratory for Hamilton's vision of American industrialization. It gave the world the light bulb, the phonograph, the transistor, the Unix operating system, and the C programming language, all invented within its borders. Its pharmaceutical corridor between Princeton and Newark contains more drug company headquarters than any comparable stretch of land on Earth. Its Route 1 corridor has been called, without much exaggeration, the most economically productive strip of real estate in American history.

New Jersey is also a state of deep complexity and ongoing struggle. Its cities, Newark, Trenton, Camden, Paterson, carry the weight of 20th-century deindustrialization and demographic displacement while showing real signs of revival. Its Shore communities balance the joy of a century of summer tradition against increasing vulnerability to sea level rise and extreme weather. Its politics are fierce, often corrupt at the edges, and always interesting. No state produces more federal indictments of public officials per capita than New Jersey, and no state produces more proud, defensive, self-aware identity in its residents.