History of Barack Obama
Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from Columbia University in 1983 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and later worked as a community organizerin Chicago. In 1988, Obama enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He also went into elective politics; Obama represented the 13th district in the Illinois Senatefrom 1997 until 2004, when he successfully ran for the U.S. Senate. In the 2008 presidential election, after a close primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, he was nominated by the Democratic Party for president. Obama selected Joe Biden as his running mate and defeated Republican nominee John McCain.
Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, a decision that drew both criticism and praise. His first-term actions addressed the global financial crisis and included a major stimulus package to guide the economy in recovering from the Great Recession, a partial extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts, legislation to reform health care, a major financial regulation reform bill, and the end of a major U.S. military presence in Iraq. Obama also appointed Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the former being the first Hispanic American on the Supreme Court. He ordered Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, who was responsible for the September 11 attacks. Obama downplayed Bush's counterinsurgency model, expanding air strikes and making extensive use of special forces, while encouraging greater reliance on host-government militaries. He also ordered military involvement in Libya in order to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1973, contributing to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
Obama defeated Republican opponent Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election. In his second term, Obama took steps to combat climate change, signing a major international climate agreement and an executive order to limit carbon emissions. Obama also presided over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and other legislation passed in his first term. He negotiated a nuclear agreement with Iran and normalized relations with Cuba. The number of American soldiers in Afghanistan decreased during Obama's second term, though U.S. soldiers remained in the country throughout Obama's presidency. Obama promoted inclusion for LGBT Americans, becoming the first sitting U.S. president to publicly support same-sex marriage.
Obama left office on January 20, 2017, and continues to reside in Washington, D.C. Historians and political scientists rank him among the upper tier in historical rankings of American presidents. His presidential library in the South Side of Chicago began construction in 2021. Since leaving office, Obama has remained politically active, campaigning for candidates in various American elections, including Biden's successful presidential bid in 2020. Outside of politics, Obama has published three books: Dreams from My Father (1995), The Audacity of Hope (2006), and A Promised Land (2020).
Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961,[2] at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii.[3][4][5][6] He is the only president born outside the contiguous 48 states.[7] He was born to an 18-year-old American mother and a 27-year-old Kenyan father. His mother, Ann Dunham (1942–1995), was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of English, Welsh, German, Swiss, and Irish descent. In 2007 it was discovered her great-great-grandfather Falmouth Kearney emigrated from the village of Moneygall, Ireland to the U.S. in 1850.[8] In July 2012, Ancestry.com found a strong likelihood that Dunham was descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who lived in the Colony of Virginia during the seventeenth century.[9][10][11] Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr. (1934–1982),[12][13] was a married[14][15][16] Luo Kenyan from Nyang'oma Kogelo.[14][17] His last name, Obama, was derived from his Luo descent.[18] Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship.[19][20] The couple married in Wailuku, Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.[21][22]
In late August 1961, a few weeks after he was born, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, Barack's father completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962. He left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. in economics. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964.[23] Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the Senior Economic Analyst in the Ministry of Finance.[24] He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas 1971,[25] before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old.[26] Recalling his early childhood, Obama said: "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."[20] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.[27]
In 1963, Dunham met Lolo Soetoro at the University of Hawaii; he was an Indonesian East–West Center graduate student in geography. The couple married on Molokai on March 15, 1965.[28] After two one-year extensions of his J-1 visa, Lolo returned to Indonesia in 1966. His wife and stepson followed sixteen months later in 1967. The family initially lived in the Menteng Dalam neighborhood in the Tebet district of South Jakarta. From 1970, they lived in a wealthier neighborhood in the Menteng district of Central Jakarta.
At the age of six, Obama and his mother had moved to Indonesia to join his stepfather. From age six to ten, he was registered in school as "Barry"[30] and attended local Indonesian-language schools: Sekolah Dasar Katolik Santo Fransiskus Asisi (St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Elementary School) for two years and Sekolah Dasar Negeri Menteng 01(State Elementary School Menteng 01) for one and a half years, supplemented by English-language Calvert Schoolhomeschooling by his mother.[31][32] As a result of his four years in Jakarta, he was able to speak Indonesian fluently as a child.[33] During his time in Indonesia, Obama's stepfather taught him to be resilient and gave him "a pretty hardheaded assessment of how the world works".[34]
In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham. He attended Punahou School—a private college preparatory school—with the aid of a scholarship from fifth grade until he graduated from high school in 1979.[35] In high school, Obama continued to use the nickname "Barry" which he kept until making a visit to Kenya in 1980.[36] Obama lived with his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro, in Hawaii for three years from 1972 to 1975 while his mother was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Hawaii.[37]Obama chose to stay in Hawaii when his mother and half-sister returned to Indonesia in 1975, so his mother could begin anthropology field work.[38] His mother spent most of the next two decades in Indonesia, divorcing Lolo Soetoro in 1980 and earning a PhD degree in 1992, before dying in 1995 in Hawaii following unsuccessful treatment for ovarian and uterine cancer.[39]
Of his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered — to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect — became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."[40] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind".[41] Obama was also a member of the "Choom Gang" (the slang term for smoking marijuana), a self-named group of friends who spent time together and smoked marijuana.[42][43]
College and research jobs
After graduating from high school in 1979, Obama moved to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College on a full scholarship. In February 1981, Obama made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to participate in the disinvestment from South Africa in response to that nation's policy of apartheid.[44] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and half-sister Maya and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan for three weeks.[44]Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City as a junior, where he majored in political sciencewith a specialty in international relations[45] and in English literature[46] and lived off-campus on West 109th Street.[47]He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1983 and a 3.7 GPA. After graduating, Obama worked for about a year at the Business International Corporation, where he was a financial researcher and writer,[48][49] then as a project coordinator for the New York Public Interest Research Groupon the City College of New York campus for three months in 1985.[50][51][52]
Community organizer and Harvard Law School
Two years after graduating from Columbia, Obama moved from New York to Chicago when he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project, a faith-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.[51][53] He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.[54] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.[55] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.[56][57]
Despite being offered a full scholarship to Northwestern University School of Law, Obama enrolled at Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988, living in nearby Somerville, Massachusetts.[59] He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,[60] president of the journal in his second year,[54][61] and research assistant to the constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe while at Harvard.[62] During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as a summer associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.[63]Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention[54][61] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,[64] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.[64] Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1991 with a Juris Doctor magna cum laude.[65][60]
University of Chicago Law School
In 1991, Obama accepted a two-year position as Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School to work on his first book.[64][66] He then taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, first as a lecturer from 1992 to 1996, and then as a senior lecturer from 1996 to 2004.[67]
From April to October 1992, Obama directed Illinois's Project Vote, a voter registration campaign with ten staffers and seven hundred volunteer registrars; it achieved its goal of registering 150,000 of 400,000 unregistered African Americans in the state, leading Crain's Chicago Business to name Obama to its 1993 list of "40 under Forty" powers to be.[68]
Family and personal life
In a 2006 interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family: "It's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher."[69] Obama has a half-sister with whom he was raised (Maya Soetoro-Ng) and seven other half-siblings from his Kenyan father's family, six of them living.[70] Obama's mother was survived by her Kansas-born mother, Madelyn Dunham,[71] until her death on November 2, 2008,[72] two days before his election to the presidency. Obama also has roots in Ireland; he met with his Irish cousins in Moneygall in May 2011.[73] In Dreams from My Father, Obama ties his mother's family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War. He also shares distant ancestors in common with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, among others.[74][75][76]
Obama lived with anthropologist Sheila Miyoshi Jager while he was a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s.[77]He proposed to her twice, but both Jager and her parents turned him down.[77][78] The relationship was not made public until May 2017, several months after his presidency had ended.[78]
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