Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lithuanian retains archaic grammatical and phonological features found otherwise only in ancient languages such as Sanskrit and Ancient Greek. Linguists consider it the closest living language to Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of all Indo-European tongues, preserving structures that have disappeared from virtually every other descendant family.
The first Lithuanian book was printed on the 8th of January 1547. It was the Catechism of Martynas Mažvydas, produced in Lithuania Minor under Prussian rule.
In 1864, following the January Uprising, Russian Governor General Mikhail Muravyov banned publication of Lithuanian texts in the Latin alphabet and prohibited the teaching of Lithuanian in schools. The ban lasted until 1904. During this period, books were printed in East Prussia and the United States and smuggled into Lithuania by carriers known as knygnešiai.
Jonas Jablonskis (1860-1930), known as the father of standardized Lithuanian, established the standard based on the Western Aukštaitian dialect supplemented with features of the Eastern Prussian Lithuanian dialect of Lithuania Minor. He was the first to formally set down the essential principles of standard written Lithuanian in his Lietuviškos kalbos gramatika.
The first recorded Lithuanian word was Ba, an interjection. It was recorded on the 24th of December 1207 in the chronicle of Henry of Latvia, reported as the exclamation of a Lithuanian raider after he found no loot in a Livonian church.
During the Soviet occupation, Lithuanian speakers passively resisted Russification and continued using their language in daily life despite Russian dominating state institutions and 61-74% of broadcasts being in Russian by 1970. On the 18th of November 1988, the Supreme Soviet of the Lithuanian SSR restored Lithuanian as the official language under pressure from the pro-independence movement Sąjūdis, ahead of Lithuania's formal re-establishment of statehood on the 11th of March 1990.