The 1664 Game

Here's a neat little game.

England's Duke of York conveyed the lands he called "New Jersey" to Sir John Carteret and John Lord Berkeley in 1664 - June 24th, to be specific. So 1664 is considered the birth of our Garden State.

Go get your favorite book about New Jersey history - it should have more than 166 pages, because you're going to turn to page 166. Count down to the 4th full paragraph on that page. Consider sharing what it says as a comment to this blog post!

I picked Marc Mappen's "There's More to New Jersey Than the Sopranos" (2009, Rivergate Books). Page 166 is in a chapter on Orson Welles' 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," that had Martians landing in little Grovers Mill, NJ. Many who tuned in after the show had begun - and after the disclaimer that it was just a dramatization - thought we really were being invaded from Mars.

"Nobody knows how many listeners came to believe that there was a real invasion going on - this was not the sort of thing somebody would want to admit the next day. Probably the numbers were in the thousands, not the millions. But while limited in numbers, the panic seems to have occurred around the nation."

So what will the 1664 Game find in your favorite NJ history books?