Obama biography background

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His parents, who met as students at the University of Hawaii, were Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, and Barack Obama Sr., a black Kenyan studying in the United States. Obama's father left the family when Obama was two and, after further studies at Harvard University, returned to Kenya, where he died in an automobile accident nineteen years later. After his parents divorced, Obama's mother married another foreign student at the University of Hawaii, Lolo Soetoro of Indonesia. From age six through ten, Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia, where he attended Catholic and Muslim schools. “I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child,” Obama later recalled. “And so what I benefited from is a multiplicity of cultures that all fed me.”

Concerned for his education, Obama’s mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and to attend Hawaii’s prestigious Punahou School from fifth grade through graduation from high school. While Obama was in school, his mother divorced Soetoro, returned to Hawaii to study cultural anthropology at the university, and then went back to Indonesia to do field research. Living with his grandparents, Obama was a good but not outstanding student at Punahou. He played varsity basketball and, as he later admitted, “dabbled in drugs and alcohol,” including marijuana and cocaine. As for religion, Obama later wrote, because his parents and grandparents were nonbelievers, “I was not raised in a religious household.”

Obama's mother, who “to the end of her life [in 1995] would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal,” deeply admired the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and taught her son, he later wrote, that “To be black was to be the beneficiary of a great inheritance, a special destiny, glorious burden

Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii to Barack Obama, Sr. (1936–1982) (born in Oriang' Kogelo of Rachuonyo North District,Kenya) and Stanley Ann Dunham, known as Ann (1942–1995) (born in Wichita, Kansas, United States).

Obama spent most of his childhood years in Honolulu, where his mother attended the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Obama had a close relationship with his maternal grandparents. In 1965, his mother remarried to Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia. Two years later, Dunham took Obama with her to Indonesia to reunite him with his stepfather. In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to attend Punahou School, from which he graduated in 1979.

As a young adult, Obama moved to the contiguous United States, where he was educated at Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School. In Chicago, Obama worked at various times as a community organizer, lawyer, lecturer and senior Lecturer of constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School in the city's South Side, and later published his memoir Dreams from My Father before beginning his political career in 1997 as a member of the Illinois Senate.

Childhood years

Parents' background and meeting

Main article: Family of Barack Obama

Barack Obama's parents met in 1960 while they were students at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Obama's father, Barack Obama, Sr., the university's first foreign student from an African nation, hailed from Oriang' Kogelo, Rachuonyo North District, in the Nyanza Province of western Kenya. Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, known as Ann, had been born in Wichita. They married on the Hawaiian island of Maui on February 2, 1961.

Barack Hussein Obama II, born in Honolulu on August 4, 1961, at the old Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital at 1611 Bingham S

Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

His story is the American story — values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.

With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.

After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.

He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.

President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.

He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. After being re-elected in 2012, President Obama is currently serving his second and final term, which will end in January 2017. See photos from the President's second inauguration here.

President Obama

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States—becoming the first African American to serve in that office—on January 20, 2009.

The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii. Leaving the state to attend college, he earned degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago, where he met and married Michelle LaVaughn Robinson in 1992. Their two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha (Sasha), were born in 1998 and 2001, respectively. Obama was elected to the Illinois state senate in 1996 and served there for eight years. In 2004, he was elected by a record majority to the US Senate from Illinois and, in February 2007, announced his candidacy for president. After winning a closely fought contest against New York Senator and former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton for the Democratic nomination, Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Republican nominee for president, in the general election.

When President Obama took office, he faced very significant challenges. The economy was officially in a recession, and the outgoing administration of George W. Bush had begun to implement a controversial "bail-out" package to try to help struggling financial institutions. In foreign affairs, the United States still had troops deployed in difficult conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

During the first two years of his first term, President Obama was able to work with the Democratic-controlled Congress to improve the economy, pass health-care reform legislation, and withdraw most US troops from Iraq. After the Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, the president spent significant time and political effort negotiating, for the most part unsuccessfully, with congressional Republicans about taxes, budgets, and the deficit. After winning reelection in 2012, Obama began his second term focused on s