Connecticut

Connecticut is the third-smallest state in the country and has been writing things down since 1639, when the river towns of Hartford, Windsor and Wethersfield adopted the Fundamental Orders. Some historians call them the first written constitution in the Western tradition, and the state's nickname comes from them.

Almost 150 years later, in 1787, two of its delegates in Philadelphia, Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth, proposed the compromise that settled the fight over Congress: representation by population in the House, equal votes for every state in the Senate. Connecticut ratified the Constitution on January 9, 1788, the fifth state to do so.

The shore is the other half of the story. Counting its navigable rivers, the state has more than 600 miles of coastline, and its oldest lighthouse, New London Harbor Light, was first built in 1760. The stone tower standing today dates from 1801, and the light still works.

The picture is a New England travel poster in amber and teal: a white lighthouse on a rocky point, a sailboat with two white sails on calm water, a white church with a tall steeple among red houses and orange maples on the far shore, and in the foreground a boiled lobster laid out on weathered dock planks beside a lobster trap.