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Barack Obama served as 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...
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- Overview
- Early life
Barack Obama’s parents married while students at the University of Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., a Kenyan, became an economist in the government of Kenya. His mother, S. Ann Dunham, became an anthropologist. They divorced in 1964. Ann then married (and later divorced) another foreign student, Indonesian Lolo Soetoro.
Where did Barack Obama attend school?
Barack Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite academy in Honolulu, and then attended Occidental College before transferring to Columbia University and earning (1983) a B.A. in political science. He graduated (1991) magna cum laude from Harvard University’s law school and was the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.
What did Barack Obama do for a living?
After working as a writer and editor in Manhattan, Barack Obama became a community organizer in Chicago, lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, worked as a civil rights attorney, and then served in the Illinois Senate (1997–2004), as a U.S. senator (2005–08), and as U.S. president (2009–17).
What did Barack Obama write?
Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a teenage goatherd in rural Kenya, won a scholarship to study in the United States, and eventually became a senior economist in the Kenyan government. Obama’s mother, S. Ann Dunham, grew up in Kansas, Texas, and Washington state before her family settled in Honolulu. In 1960 she and Barack Sr. met in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii and married less than a year later.
When Obama was age two, Barack Sr. left to study at Harvard University; shortly thereafter, in 1964, Ann and Barack Sr. divorced. (Obama saw his father only one more time, during a brief visit when Obama was 10.) Later Ann remarried, this time to another foreign student, Lolo Soetoro from Indonesia, with whom she had a second child, Maya. Obama lived for several years in Jakarta with his half sister, mother, and stepfather. While there, Obama attended both a government-run school where he received some instruction in Islam and a Catholic private school where he took part in Christian schooling.
He returned to Hawaii in 1971 and lived in a modest apartment, sometimes with his grandparents and sometimes with his mother (she remained for a time in Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and then went abroad again—partly to pursue work on a Ph.D.—before divorcing Soetoro in 1980). For a brief period his mother was aided by government food stamps, but the family mostly lived a middle-class existence. In 1979 Obama graduated from Punahou School, an elite college preparatory academy in Honolulu.
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Obama attended Occidental College in suburban Los Angeles for two years and then transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where in 1983 he received a bachelor’s degree in political science. Influenced by professors who pushed him to take his studies more seriously, Obama experienced great intellectual growth during college and for a couple of years thereafter. He led a rather ascetic life and read works of literature and philosophy by William Shakespeare, Friedrich Nietzsche, Toni Morrison, and others. After serving for a couple of years as a writer and editor for Business International Corp., a research, publishing, and consulting firm in Manhattan, he took a position in 1985 as a community organizer on Chicago’s largely impoverished Far South Side. He returned to school three years later and graduated magna cum laude in 1991 from Harvard University’s law school, where he was the first African American to serve as president of the Harvard Law Review. While a summer associate in 1989 at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin, Obama had met Chicago native Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer at the firm. The two married in 1992.
- Barack Obama’s Early Life. Obama’s father, also named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small village in Nyanza Province, Kenya, as a member of the Luo ethnicity.
- Barack Obama’s Education. At age 10, Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. He attended the Punahou School, an elite private school where, as he wrote in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, he first began to understand the tensions inherent in his mixed racial background.
- Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney. After a two-year stint working in corporate research and at the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he took a job as a community organizer with a church-based group, the Developing Communities Project.
- Senator Barack Obama. In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, winning election to the Illinois State Senate as a Democrat from the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park.
- Obama’s Parents. Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa and eventually earned a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of going to college in Hawaii.
- Life in Hawaii. While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou School. He excelled in basketball and graduated with academic honors in 1979.
- Obama’s Half-Siblings. Obama’s family includes six half-siblings located around the world. He shares a mother with half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and has five paternal half-siblings.
- Illinois Senator. Encouraged by poll numbers, Obama decided to run for the open U.S. Senate seat, vacated by Republican Peter Fitzgerald. In the 2004 Democratic primary, he defeated multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull and Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes with 52 percent of the vote.
Barack Obama's tenure as the 44th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 2009, and ended on January 20, 2017. Obama, a Democrat from Illinois, took office following his victory over Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential election.
Welcome to the Office of Barack and Michelle Obama. We Love You Back. Play video. As President Obama has said, the change we seek will take longer than one term or one presidency. Real change—big change—takes many years and requires each generation to embrace the obligations and opportunities that come with the title of Citizen.
Barack 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.
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