found a solution on this page: https://getsatisfaction.com/balupton/topics/history_js_and_retrieving_state_from_a_url
"You can use this function however from one of my utility projects called jQuery Sparkle to do what you need: https://github.com/balupton/jquery-sparkle/blob/master/scripts/resources/core.string.js#L164
So you would do this:
var State = History.getState(), dataQuery = State.url. queryStringToJSON();"