Answer: The brutality of his muder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States. Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.
Germany was the aggressor nation. The event described was the <u>siege of Leningrad</u>, part of Germany's World War II aggression against the Soviet Union. The siege lasted from September 1941 to January 1944, a total of 872 days. More than 1,000,000 Soviet civilians died during the siege. (German forces had finally weakened by then.)
He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he accidentally stumbled upon the Americas.