@ZackMaril points to a blog post where he discusses the potential benefits of a Backbone.Router that could provide state awareness to other application objects such as models. Scroll down to the Eidetic backbone section to read more.
http://zacharymaril.com/blog/2012/07/10/ideas-about-future-o...
Yep! It looks like if you hooked this up to the router with serialization function, you could embed state directly into the url without too much effort.