Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Dartmouth Workshop was a summer research project held at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1956. Formally called the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, it is widely considered the founding event of artificial intelligence as a field. The project lasted roughly six to eight weeks and consisted largely of brainstorming sessions.
The four organizers were John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon. They formally submitted the proposal on the 2nd of September 1955 and are considered among the founding fathers of AI.
The workshop began around the 18th of June 1956 and ended on or around the 17th of August 1956, according to Ray Solomonoff's contemporaneous notes. It ran for approximately eight weeks, though it is often described as having lasted six weeks.
McCarthy chose the name partly for its neutrality. He wanted to avoid the narrowness of automata theory and the focus on analog feedback that came with cybernetics. He also wished to sidestep the influence of Norbert Wiener, whom he described as assertive and difficult to argue with.
Among the attendees recorded in Ray Solomonoff's notes were Solomonoff himself, Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, Trenchard More, Nathaniel Rochester, Oliver Selfridge, Julian Bigelow, W. Ross Ashby, W.S. McCulloch, Abraham Robinson, Tom Etter, John Nash, Arthur Samuel, Alex Bernstein, Herbert Simon, and Allen Newell. Only Solomonoff, Minsky, and McCarthy stayed for the full duration.
The proposal, submitted on the 2nd of September 1955, is credited with introducing the term artificial intelligence. It outlined ambitions to make machines use language, form abstractions, solve problems reserved for humans, and improve themselves. The topics it addressed, including natural language processing, neural networks, and theory of computation, remain active areas of the field.