Short answers, pulled from the story.
The first formal recording of bebop was released on the 16th of February 1944 during a session led by Coleman Hawkins. This recording marked a violent rupture in the history of American music and followed a period where the American Federation of Musicians strike had barred instrumentalists from recording on major labels.
The true birthplace of bebop was the basement of Minton's Playhouse, a Harlem nightclub where the house band included Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke. This location served as a laboratory in the late 1930s and early 1940s where musicians experimented with the limits of their instruments during legendary jam sessions.
Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became the twin pillars of the bebop movement while musicians like Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke formed the house band at Minton's Playhouse. The genre also relied on bassists such as Milt Hinton and Gene Ramey who developed walking bass lines and drummers like Max Roach who shifted timekeeping to the ride cymbal.
The American Federation of Musicians strike began in 1942 and lasted until 1944, barring more than 130,000 members from recording on major labels. This vacuum forced swing bands to disperse into smaller combos that were better suited for experimentation and allowed the new music to develop largely unrecorded before specialty labels like Apollo and Savoy captured the sound.
Bebop was a sociological movement that confronted the racial divide of America before the Civil Rights Movement had even begun through the actions of African American musicians. Dizzy Gillespie used his platform to challenge the status quo with a subversive sense of humor while the music served as a form of resistance for black artists to assert their creativity and technical mastery.
By 1950 the initial jaggedness of early bebop gave way to new styles including the cool school of jazz led by Miles Davis and the post-bop movement which incorporated modal jazz. The music also influenced the Beat Generation through writers like Jack Kerouac and gained cult status in France and Japan.