Short answers, pulled from the story.
Solidarity was founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland. It officially registered on the 10th of November 1980, after more than twenty Inter-factory Founding Committees merged into a single national organisation on the 17th of September 1980.
Anna Walentynowicz was fired from the Gdansk Shipyard on the 7th of August 1980, five months before her scheduled retirement, for participation in an illegal trade union. Workers staged a strike on the 14th of August defending Walentynowicz and demanding her reinstatement, and Walentynowicz and Alina Pienkowska then expanded it into a broader solidarity strike with workers at other establishments.
Solidarity's membership peaked at ten million in September 1981, representing one-third of Poland's working-age population, making it the largest trade union membership in the world at the time.
Lech Walesa, who was elected president of Solidarity at its first national congress in September 1981, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983. He later served as President of Poland after being elected in December 1990.
The CIA transferred around two million dollars yearly in cash to Solidarity from 1982 onwards, totalling approximately ten million dollars over five years, all channelled through third parties. The AFL-CIO raised three hundred thousand dollars from its members for direct material and cash support, and the National Endowment for Democracy allocated a further ten million dollars to Solidarity.
In the elections held on the 4th of June 1989, Solidarity won ninety-nine of the one hundred Senate seats and all one hundred and sixty-one contestable seats in the Sejm. By the end of August 1989, a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed with Tadeusz Mazowiecki as Prime Minister, the first non-communist to hold that office since the 1940s.