Problem: Background: Rasputin was born a peasant in the small village of Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River in the Tobolsk guberniya (now Tyumen Oblast) in Siberia. According to official records, he was born on 21 January [O.S. 9 January] 1869, and christened the following day. He was named for St. Gregory of Nyssa, whose feast was celebrated on January 10. There are few records of Rasputin's parents.
Context: In 1897, Rasputin developed a renewed interest in religion, and left Pokrovskoye to go on a pilgrimage. His reasons for doing so are unclear: according to some sources, Rasputin left the village to escape punishment for his role in a horse theft. Other sources suggest that he had a vision - either of the Virgin Mary, or of St. Simeon of Verkhoturye - while still others suggest that Rasputin's pilgrimage was inspired by his interactions with a young theological student, Melity Zaborovsky. Whatever his reasons, Rasputin's departure was a radical life change: he was twenty-eight, had been married ten years, and had an infant son with another child on the way. According to Douglas Smith, his decision "could only have been occasioned by some sort of emotional or spiritual crisis." Rasputin had undertaken earlier, shorter pilgrimages to the Holy Znamensky Monastery at Abalak and to Tobolsk's cathedral, but his visit to the St. Nicholas Monastery at Verkhoturye in 1897 was transformative. There, he met and was "profoundly humbled" by a starets (elder) known as Makary. Rasputin may have spent several months at Verkhoturye, and it was perhaps here that he learned to read and write, but he later complained about the monastery itself, claiming that some of the monks engaged in homosexuality and criticizing monastic life as too coercive. He returned to Pokrovskoye a changed man, looking disheveled and behaving differently than he had before. He became a vegetarian, swore off alcohol, and prayed and sang much more fervently than he had in the past. Rasputin would spend the years that followed living as a Strannik, (a holy wanderer, or pilgrim), leaving Pokrovskoye for months or even years at a time to wander the country and visit a variety of different holy sites. It is possible that Rasputin wandered as far Athos, Greece - the center of Orthodox monastic life - in 1900. By the early 1900s, Rasputin had developed a small circle of acolytes, primarily family members and other local peasants, who prayed with him on Sundays and other holy days when he was in Pokrovskoye. Building a makeshift chapel in Efim's root cellar - Rasputin was still living within his father's household at the time - the group held secret prayer meetings there. These meetings were the subject of some suspicion and hostility from the village priest and other villagers. It was rumored that female followers were ceremonially washing him before each meeting, that the group sang strange songs that the villagers had not heard before, and even that Rasputin had joined the Khlysty, a religious sect whose ecstatic rituals were rumored to included self-flagellation and sexual orgies. According to historian Joseph Fuhrmann, however, "repeated investigations failed to establish that Rasputin was ever a member of the sect," and rumors that he was a Khlyst appear to have been unfounded.
Question: Why was is transformative
Answer: Rasputin may have spent several months at Verkhoturye, and it was perhaps here that he learned to read and write,

Background: Columbus Delano, (June 4, 1809 - October 23, 1896) was a lawyer, rancher, banker, statesman and a member of the prominent Delano family. Delano was elected U.S. Congressman from Ohio, serving two full terms and one partial one. Prior to the American Civil War, Delano was a National Republican and then a Whig; as a Whig he was identified with the faction of the party that opposed the spread of slavery into the Western territories, and he became a Republican when the party was founded as the major anti-slavery party after the demise of the Whigs in the 1850s. During Reconstruction Delano advocated federal protection of African-Americans civil rights, and argued that the former Confederate states should be administered by the federal government, but were not part of the United States until they met the requirements for readmission to the Union.
Context: On his resignation from Grant's cabinet, Delano returned to Mount Vernon where for the next twenty years he served as president of the First National Bank of Mount Vernon. He was a longtime trustee of Kenyon College, which awarded him the honorary degree of LL.D.; among his charitable and civic donations was his endowment of Kenyon's Delano Hall; this building was in use until it was destroyed by a fire in 1906. His Lakeholm mansion, built in 1871 at the outskirts of Mount Vernon, is now part of Mount Vernon Nazarene University. On April 3, 1880, John W. Wright, a judge from Indiana, was convicted at trial of having assaulted Delano on a Washington, D.C. street corner on October 12, 1877. Wright, who had been an Indian Agent in the Interior Department while Delano was Secretary, had been convicted of fraud, and blamed Delano. On the day of the assault he was in the company of Walter H. Smith, formerly Solicitor of the Department of the Interior; Wright was accused of provoking a fight by questioning Delano's honesty as Secretary of the Interior, and then striking Delano with his walking stick. Wright claimed that Delano had been verbally harassing him, and that he then felt compelled to defend himself. Delano did not sustain serious injuries; Wright's defense was weakened by witness testimony that after the assault, he claimed credit for it, and stated that he would have continued if passers-by had not intervened. Wright was sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined $1,000. On April 8, 1880 President Rutherford B. Hayes pardoned Wright, with his release from custody conditional upon payment of the fine. On December 3, 1889 Delano was elected President of the National Wool Growers Association, a lobbying group organized to advocate for tariff protection of the national wool industry. The association had been formed in 1865, and became more active in the 1880s as a response to the decline in domestic wool production; wool growers faced increasing overseas competition, and had gone from 50 million sheep producing wool in 1883 to 40 million in 1888.
Question: where did this take place
Answer:
Washington, D.C. street corner