On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States. He served two terms in the position, a time marked with numerous achievements, including passing the Affordable Care Act, repealing the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy, and overseeing the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Obama is also the author of three best-selling books: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995), The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006), and A Promised Land (2020).
Barack Obama: Biography
From Hawaii to Indonesia and Chicago to the White House, Barack Obama's biography reveals the varied experiences of his life.
Childhood and Early Life
Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. His mother, Ann Dunham, was an American woman from Kansas, and his father, Barack Obama Sr., was a Kenyan man studying in Hawaii. A few weeks after Obama was born, he and his mother moved to Seattle, Washington, while his father finished his bachelor's degree in Hawaii.
Fig. 1: Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Obama Sr. then accepted a position at Harvard University, and Dunham moved back to Hawaii with her young son to be close to her parents. Dunham and Obama Sr. divorced in 1964. The following year, Obama's mother remarried, this time to an Indonesian surveyor.
In 1967, Dunham and a six-year-old Obama moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, to live with his stepfather. For four years, the family lived in Jakarta, and Obama attended Indonesian-language schools and was educated in English by his mother at home. In 1971, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents and finish his education.
Barack Obama's Education
Barack Obama graduated from high school in 1979 and received a scholarship to study at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He spent two years at Occidental before transferring to Columbia University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in political science specializing in international relations and English literature.
After graduating in 1983, Obama spent a year working for the Business International Corporation and later the New York Public Interest Group. In 1985, he moved to Chicago for a community organizing job as the director of the Developing Communities Project, a faith-based organization that Obama helped to organize programs, including tutoring and job training.
He worked for the organization until 1988, when he enrolled in Harvard Law School. In his second year, he was selected as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. This landmark moment led to the publishing contract for the book that would become Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama's memoir. While at Harvard, Obama returned to Chicago in the summers and worked at two different law firms.
At one of these firms, his mentor was a young attorney named Michelle Robinson. The two were engaged in 1991 and got married the following year.
Obama graduated from Harvard in 1991 and accepted a fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School, where he taught constitutional law and worked on his first book. Upon returning to Chicago, Obama also became active in politics, including a key voter drive that significantly impacted the outcome of the 1992 presidential election.
Political Career
In 1996, Obama began his political career with his election to the Illinois Senate, where he served one two-year term and two four-year terms. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, a position he held until he was elected president.
At the 2004 Democratic National Convention, then-senatorial candidate Barack Obama delivered the keynote address, a moving speech that brought Obama large-scale, national recognition for the first time.
In 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president. He announced in Springfield, Illinois, in front of the Old Capitol Building where Abraham Lincoln had given his 1858 "House Divided" speech. At the beginning of his campaign, Obama was a relative underdog. However, he quickly began to generate an unprecedented amount of enthusiasm among voters and defeated front-runner and party favorite Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination.
Fig. 2: Barack Obama revealed himself to be a gifted public speaker early in his political career.
Obama was elected as the first African American president of the United States on November 4, 2008. He and his running mate, then-Senator Joe Biden, beat Republican John McCain with 365 to 173 electoral votes and 52.9 percent of the popular vote.
Obama was reelected in 2012 for a second term as president. He served until January 20, 2017, when the presidency was passed to Donald Trump. Since the end of his presidency, Obama has remained active in politics, including campaigning for various Democratic candidates. Obama currently lives with his family in the affluent Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
Barack Obama: Books
Barack Obama has written and published three books.
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)
Barack Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father, was written while the author was a Visiting Law and Government Fellow at the University of Chicago Law school. The book is a memoir that traces Obama's life from childhood through his acceptance to Harvard Law School.
Although Dreams from My Father is a memoir and a work of nonfiction, Obama took some creative liberties that led to some criticism of inaccuracy. However, the book has often been praised for its literary value, and it was included in Time magazine's list of the 100 best nonfiction books since 1923.
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (2006)
In 2004, Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. In the speech, he referred to America's optimism in the face of difficulty and uncertainty, saying that the nation has "the audacity of hope." The Audacity of Hope was released two years after Obama's speech and U.S. Senate victory and expanded on many of the political points he outlined in his address.
A Promised Land (2020)
Barack Obama's most recent book, A Promised Land, is another memoir that details the president's life from his first political campaigns through to the killing of Osama bin Laden in May of 2011. It is the first volume in a planned two-part series.
Fig. 3: A Promised Land tells the story of Obama's presidency.
The memoir became an immediate bestseller and was included on numerous best-book-of-the-year lists, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian.
Barack Obama: Key Quotes
In 2004, Barack Obama gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, which catapulted him to national political stardom.
Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us -- the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of "anything goes." Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there's the United States of America." -Democratic National Convention (2004)
The powerful speech immediately ignited speculation about a presidential run, even though Obama had yet to even be elected to the U.S. Senate. Obama shared his own story, highlighting the unlikeliness of his very presence on the convention stage. He sought to underscore the unity and connectedness of all Americans, regardless of class, race, or ethnicity.
But in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. For when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people: Yes we can." -New Hampshire Democratic Primary (2008)
Despite losing the Democratic primary in New Hampshire to Hillary Clinton, the speech that Obama gave on January 8, 2008, became one of the most iconic moments of his campaign. "Yes we can" was Obama's signature slogan beginning with his 2004 Senate race, and this example from New Hampshire Democratic Primary was one of its most memorable manifestations. He repeated the phrase in many of his speeches, including his farewell speech in 2017, and it was repeatedly chanted by crowds at rallies nationwide.
White folks. The term itself was uncomfortable in my mouth at first; I felt like a non-native speaker tripping over a difficult phrase. Sometimes I would find myself talking to Ray about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother's smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false." -Dreams from My Father, Chapter Four
This quote comes from Barack Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father, a memoir but also a meditation on race in the United States. Obama comes from a highly multicultural and interracial family. His mother was a white woman from Kansas, and his father was a Black man from Kenya. His mother then married an Indonesian man, and she and a young Obama lived in Indonesia for several years. Because of this, he describes a more complex understanding of the inadequacies of racial distinctions.
Barack Obama: Interesting Facts
- Barack Obama is the only U.S. president born outside the lower forty-eight states.
- Obama has seven half-siblings from his father's three other marriages and one half-sister from his mother.
- In the 1980s, Obama lived with an anthropologist named Sheila Miyoshi Jager. He asked her to marry him twice but was turned down.
- Obama has two daughters. The eldest, Malia, was born in 1998, and the youngest, Natasha (known as Sasha), was born in 2001.
- Obama was awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 2009 for his efforts in international diplomacy during his first year in office.
- While in office, Obama, an avid reader, began sharing end-of-year lists of favorite books, movies, and music, a tradition he continues to this day.
Barack Obama - Key takeaways
- Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.
- Obama graduated from Colombia University with his bachelor's degree and later graduated from Harvard Law School.
- Obama first ran for public office in 1996. He served three terms in the Illinois Senate and one term in the U.S. Senate.
- Obama was elected as president of the United States on November 4, 2008.
- Obama has written three best-selling books: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, and A Promised Land.
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