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Home > New Jersey
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New Jersey
The state of New Jersey is found in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. It is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean on the east, by New York on the north, by Pennsylvania on the west, and by Delaware on the southwest. Parts of New Jersey lies inside the rambling metropolitan areas of Philadelphia and New York.
Inhabited by Native Americans for more than 2,800 years, the first European settlements in the area were recognized by the Dutch and Swedes in the early 1600s. The English later detained the region, naming it the Province of New Jersey, which was given to John Berkeley t andSir George Cartere, 1st Baron Berkeley of Stratton as a colony. The name was derived from the largest of the English Channel Islands called Jersey. New Jersey was an significant site at some point in the American Revolutionary War; several key battles were fought there. The winter quarters of the revolutionary army were recognized twice by George Washington in Morristown, which was refered as the military capital of revolution. Later, citizens who worked in factories in cities for example Trenton and Paterson helped to force the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century. New Jersey's position at the center of the Northeast Corridor, between Boston, Washington, D.C., New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and fueled its quick expansion through the suburban boom of the 1950s and so forth.
New Jersey was primarily settled by Native Americans, with the Lenni-Lenape being superior at the time Europeans arrived. The Lenape were slackly structured groups that able small-scale agriculture (mostly based on corn) in order to enlarge their mainly mobile hunter-gatherer culture in the region neighboring the western Long Island Sound, River Delaware River, and the lower Hudson. The Lenape society was separated into matrilinear clans that were based upon average female ancestors. These clans were organized into three different phratries recognized by their animal sign: Wolf, Turkey, and Turtle. They first contacted the Dutch in the early 1600s, and their most important relationship with the Europeans was by fur trade.
New Jersey is surrounded on the north and northeast by New York; on the southwest by Delaware along Delaware Bay; and on the west by Pennsylvania along the Delaware River; on the east by the Atlantic Ocean. New Jersey can be thought of as five regions, based on population and natural geography. Northeastern New Jersey, the Gateway Region, lies in the New York metropolitan area, and some residents travel to the city to work. Northwestern New Jersey is more forested, rural, and mountainous, but still a accepted place to live. The "Shore" along the Atlantic Coast in the southeast has its own lifestyle and residence traits owing to the ocean. The southwest is inside Metropolitan Philadelphia, and is included in the Delaware Valley. The fifth region is the Pine Barrens in the inner of the southern part and is covered rather widely by mixed oak and pine forest, and by itself has a much lower population mass than most of the rest of the state.
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