The American Revolution was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and quickly spread through the port cities of the East Coast such as New York and Philadelphia. The people in these cities relied on the ocean for nourishment, employment, shipping, and travel. As Gary B. Nash writes in The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution,

Water dominated the life of America's... seaport towns... providing them with links to the outer world, yielding up much of their sustenance, and... affecting the relationships among the different groups who made up these budding commercial capitals. Boston was built on a tadpole-shaped peninsula jutting into island-dotted Massachusetts Bay and was connected to the mainland only by a small mile-long causeway called the Neck. New York was literally an island, set in perhaps the finest natural harbor on the continent.... [People in these] colonial seaports gathered timber...