City networks are the connections between cities.

These networks can be of different nature and of different importance. In modern conceptions of cities, these networks play an important role in understanding the nature of cities. City networks can be physical connections to other places, such as railways, canals or scheduled flights. City network also exist in immaterial form, such as trade, global finance, markets, migration, cultural links, shared social spaces or shared histories. There are also networks of religious nature, in particular through pilgrimage.

The city itself is then regarded as the node where different networks run together. Some of these networks are more powerful than others, for networks of global finance are currently dominant. Some urban thinkers have indeed argued that cities can only be understood if the context of the city's connections is understood.

Neither the connections through city networks nor the dominance of particular networks are dominant or fixed. Religious networks were of greater importance in Europe in the past, whilst today arguably economic ones predominate. The case of Moscow illustrates well how city networks are not fixed. During the time of the Soviet Union, Moscow was the most powerful city because of its powerful political networks. With the end of the Cold War, however, the importance of this political network quickly changed and in Moscow now economic networks dominate. The essence of modern city conceptions, however, is that all these networks are seen as co-existent. This overlapping of different networks allows to explain why cities are so different.

Harriet Tubman (born Araminta Harriet Ross; 1820 – March 10, 1913) was an African-American abolitionist, humanitarian, and Union spy during the American Civil War. After escaping from slavery, into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue more than 70 slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his raid on Harpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women's suffrage.

As a child in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten by masters to whom she was hired out. Early in her life, she suffered a head wound when hit by a heavy metal weight. The injury caused disabling seizures, narcoleptic attacks, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, which occurred throughout her life. A devout Christian, Tubman ascribed the visions and vivid dreams to revelations from God.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". Large rewards were offered for the return of many of the fugitive slaves, but no one then knew that Tubman was the one helping them. When the Southern-dominated Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, requiring law officials in free states to aid efforts to recapture slaves, she helped guide fugitives farther north into Canada, where slavery was prohibited.