Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joseph Priestley is credited with the independent discovery of oxygen, which he isolated in 1774 by focusing the sun's rays on mercuric oxide. He also invented carbonated water, discovered nitric oxide, ammonia, hydrochloric acid gas, sulphur dioxide, and nitrous oxide, and was among the first to propose that electrical force follows an inverse-square law.
In July 1791, a mob burned Priestley's Birmingham home, laboratory, and two Dissenting churches during what became known as the Priestley Riots. The violence was rooted in hostility toward his support for the American and French Revolutions and his advocacy for the rights of Dissenters. Priestley fled first to London and then emigrated to the United States in 1794.
Priestley remained committed to phlogiston theory, the 18th-century framework in which combustion releases a substance called phlogiston. He preferred qualitative observations over Lavoisier's quantitative approach based on the conservation of mass, and his biographer Robert Schofield argues that Priestley was fundamentally a natural philosopher rather than a chemist in the modern sense.
Priestley's Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768) is considered an early work of modern liberal political theory. It distinguished political rights from civil rights with unusual precision and argued that education and religion belonged to the private sphere beyond state control. Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer later drew on his metaphysical works as primary sources for utilitarianism.
Priestley invented carbonated water in 1767 by devising a method to infuse water with carbon dioxide from a neighbouring brewery in Leeds. He did not commercialise the discovery, but J. J. Schweppe and others built successful businesses from it. Schweppes has described Priestley as "the father of our industry."
Priestley arrived in New York City on the 4th of June 1794, spent time in Philadelphia where his sermons led to the founding of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, and then settled in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania. He died there on the 6th of February 1804 and was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Northumberland.