So, there are two levels we can answer your question on. Let's start at the meta-gaming level first. New England is to a number of very old, very good schools with strong history programs. This meant that a lot of the history writing in this country in the 18th and 19th centuries was being done by New Englanders, drawn from available New England sources. Add onto this a fine dollop of Ralph Waldo Emerson style mythmaking, and you have ever schoolkid in America knowing mid-level Boston Sons of Liberty like Paul Revere while never having heard of big names in other states like Isaac Sears or Philip Schuyler. While there were protests, riots, and tea parties in other American towns and cities, Boston's either occurred first, where larger, or had MUCH better coverage in the press and later writing.

There is a bit of segue here into the reasons that New England, Massachusetts, and Boston in particular were hotbeds of Revolutionary activity. The two Massachusetts colonies and their offspring, Connecticut and Rhode Island, all adhered to the Protestant belief that all people should be educated enough to read the Bible. The result was, by the standards of the time, an astoundingly high literacy rate. This created a large, voracious audience for the political tracts that circulated through the Anglosphere in the eighteenth century. In the years before the Revolution, the intensity of the claims made in this tracts became increasingly sharp, alleging that Parliament and even the king were involved in a grand conspiracy to rob Americans of their natural, constitutionally-guaranteed rights.

This kind of fiery rhetoric found a receptive audience in Boston because of the economic slump that hit the region after the French and Indian War. Even before the war broke out, New England, particularly the areas closer to the Atlantic seaboard, had seemingly filled up: there was no unclaimed land for young men to move onto. Instead, they had move into the over-saturated unskilled labor market of Boston, sacrifice their time, freedom, and money to an apprenticeship, move so far west that they'd be outside of ready access to kin and patronage networks, or circle their families like vultures, waiting for someone to die and pass on land as inheritance. All of these options were, to a greater or lesser extent, frustrating and emasculating, particularly since they delayed marriage and starting a family. Things were made worse after the French and Indian war, as military service (in a provincial or regular regiment, in the Navy, or aboard a privateer) was no longer an option, and as people displaced, orphaned, or widowed by the war came to Boston. Joining the Sons of Liberty or more dedicated militia groups like the Minutemen gave these men something to do, a sense of purpose, and a sense that they were fulfilling their duties as men to defend their rights and their communities.

Sources T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence

Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warning: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston

Jack Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution

Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America

Gary Nash, Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution