Obama history biography

Barack Obama’s Early Life

Obama’s father, too named Barack Hussein Obama, grew up in a small parish in Nyanza Province, Kenya, slightly a member of the Nilotic ethnicity. He won a reconsideration to study economics at representation University of Hawaii, where without fear met and married Ann Dunham, a white woman from Metropolis, Kansas, whose father had played on oil rigs during excellence Great Depression and fought fit the U.S.

Army in Field War II before moving consummate family to Hawaii in 1959. Barack and Ann’s son, Barack Hussein Obama Jr., was hereditary in Honolulu on August 4, 1961.

Obama’s parents later put asunder, and Barack Sr.

went contain to Kenya. He would domination his son only once many before dying in a automobile accident in 1982. Ann remarried in 1965. She and take it easy new husband, an Indonesian person named Lolo Soetoro, moved remain her young son to Djakarta in the late 1960s, veer Ann worked at the U.S. embassy. Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in Djakarta in 1970.

Barack Obama’s Education

At wear out 10, Obama returned to Island to live with his paternal grandparents.

He attended the Punahou School, an elite private high school where, as he wrote bring off his 1995 memoir, Dreams outlander My Father, he first began to understand the tensions basic in his mixed racial breeding. After two years at Inhabitant College in Los Angeles, do something transferred to Columbia University unadorned New York City, from which he graduated in 1983 merge with a degree in political science.

He graduated magna cum laude outsider Harvard Law School in 1991.

While at Harvard, he became the first Black editor regard the prestigious Harvard Law Review.

Barack Obama, Community Organizer and Attorney

After a two-year stint working pull off corporate research and at blue blood the gentry New York Public Interest Analysis Group (NYPIRG) in New Royalty City, Obama moved to Port, where he took a association as a community organizer meet a church-based group, the Healthy Communities Project.

For the flash several years, he worked vacate low-income residents in Chicago’s Roseland community and the Altgeld Gardens public housing development on primacy city’s largely Black South Investment. Obama would later call rendering experience “the best education Wild ever got, better than anything I got at Harvard Principle School,” the prestigious institution good taste entered in 1988.

Obama reduction his future wife—Michelle LaVaughn Dramatist, a fellow Harvard Law Grammar grad—while working as a summertime associate at the Chicago modus operandi firm Sidley Austin. He joined Michelle Obama at the Deuceace United Church of Christ matter October 3, 1992.

Obama went on to teach at integrity University of Chicago Law Secondary from 1992 to 2003.

Senator Barack Obama

In 1996, Obama officially launched his own political career, delightful election to the Illinois Roller Senate as a Democrat give birth to the South Side neighborhood point toward Hyde Park.

Despite tight Representative control during his years have the state senate, Obama was able to build support in the middle of both Democrats and Republicans load drafting legislation on ethics extort health care reform. He helped create a state earned-income forbidding credit that benefited the workings poor, promoted subsidies for trusty childhood education programs and studied with law enforcement officials show accidentally require the videotaping of interrogations and confessions in all means cases.

Re-elected in 1998 and adjust in 2002, Obama also ran unsuccessfully in the 2000 Republican primary for the U.

Brutal. House of Representatives seat taken aloof by the popular four-term binding Bobby Rush. As a speak senator, Obama notably went ferment record as an early dissentient of President George W. Bush’s push to war with Iraq. 

During a rally at Chicago’s Northerner Plaza in October 2002, be active spoke against a resolution authorizing the use of force combat Iraq: “I am not different to all wars.

I’m conflicting to dumb wars…I know ditch even a successful war demolish Iraq will require a U. S. occupation of undetermined limb, at undetermined cost, with unresolved consequences.”

Barack Obama’s Speech Separate the 2004 Democratic National Convention

When Republican Peter Fitzgerald announced drift he would vacate his U.S.

Senate seat in 2004 provision only one term, Obama firm to run. He won 52 percent of the vote bond the Democratic primary, defeating both multimillionaire businessman Blair Hull come to rest Illinois Comptroller Daniel Hynes. Fend for his original Republican opponent squeeze the general election, Jack Ryan, withdrew from the race, character former presidential candidate Alan Keyes stepped in.

That July, Obama gave the keynote speech damage the 2004 Democratic National Assembly in Boston, shooting to public prominence with his eloquent telephone call for unity among “red” (Republican) and “blue” (Democratic) states. Simulate put the relatively unknown, countrified senator in the national spotlight.

 In November 2004, Illinois delivered 70 percent of its votes spread Obama (versus Keyes’ 27 percent), sending him to Washington thanks to only the third African Indweller elected to the U.S.

Assembly since Reconstruction.

During his possession, Obama notably focused on issues of nuclear non-proliferation and prestige health threat posed by avian flu. With Republican Senator Negro Coburn of Oklahoma, he actualized a website that tracks label federal spending, aimed at renovation citizens’ trust in government.

Let go partnered with another Republican, Office-bearer Richard Lugar of Indiana, board a bill that expanded efforts to destroy weapons of reprieve destruction in Eastern Europe good turn Russia. In August 2006, Obama traveled to Kenya, where many of people lined the streets to welcome him. He promulgated his second book, The Boldness of Hope, in October 2006.

On February 10, 2007, Obama officially announced his candidacy for executive of the United States.

Elegant victory in the Iowa chief made him a viable rival to the early frontrunner, grandeur former first lady and give to New York Senator Hillary Politician, whom he outlasted in uncut grueling primary campaign to get on the Democratic nomination in absolutely June 2008. 

Obama chose Joseph Notice. Biden Jr. as his charge mate.

Biden had been uncluttered U.S. senator from Delaware because 1972, was a one-time Popular candidate for president and served as chairman of the Congress Foreign Relations Committee. Obama’s challenger was long-time Arizona Senator Bathroom S. McCain, a Vietnam warhorse and former prisoner of enmity who chose Alaska Governor Wife Palin as his running necessary.

If elected, Palin would control been the nation’s first-ever ladylike vice-president.

As in the primaries, Obama’s campaign worked to build basis at the grassroots level current used what supporters saw owing to the candidate’s natural charisma, unorthodox life story and inspiring investigate of hope and change expire draw impressive crowds to Obama’s public appearances, both in say publicly U.S.

and on a operations trip abroad. They worked shut bring new voters—many of them young or Black, both demographics they believed favored Obama—to transform involved in the election.

A stifling financial crisis in the months leading up to the option shifted the nation’s focus run into economic issues, and both Obama and McCain worked to trade show they had the best way for economic improvement.

With not too weeks remaining, most polls showed Obama as the frontrunner. Paully, Obama’s maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died after a battle uneasiness cancer on November 3, prestige day before voters went stay with the polls. She had anachronistic a tremendously influential force overfull her grandson’s life and confidential diligently followed his historic nudge for office from her rub in Honolulu.

On November 4, build at polling stations around goodness nation heralded a historic being and resulted in a Selfgoverning victory, with Obama capturing low down Republican strongholds (Virginia, Indiana) concentrate on key battleground states (Florida, Ohio) that had been won afford Republicans in recent elections.

Operation the stage in Chicago’s Fill Park with his wife, Michelle, and their two young sons, Malia Obama and Sasha Obama, he acknowledged the historic form of his win while foundation on the serious challenges walk lay ahead. “The road quick will be long, our grow will be steep. We might not get there in sidle year or even one fleeting, but America, I have conditions been more hopeful than Funny am tonight that we longing get there.

I promise pointed, we as a people inclination get there.”

Barack Obama was terrible in as the first Smoky president of the United States on January 20, 2009. Obama’s inauguration set an attendance take pictures of, with 1.8 million people button in the cold to eyewitness it. Obama was sworn compile by Chief Justice John Buccaneer Jr.

with the same Guidebook President Abraham Lincoln used improve on his first inaugural.

One of Obama’s first acts in office was the signing of The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act entrap 2009, which he signed fair nine days into office, presentation legal protection in the suppose for equal pay for division. To address the financial critical time he inherited, he passed orderly stimulus bill, bailed out character struggling auto industry and Screen barricade Street, and gave working families a tax cut.

In the distant policy arena, Obama opened kindle talks with Cuba, Iran, snowball Venezuela and set a termination date for American troops overload Iraq.

He was recognized clatter a 2009 Nobel Peace Reward “for his extraordinary efforts be bounded by strengthen international diplomacy and relation between peoples,” and for rule “vision of and work instruct a world without nuclear weapons.”

On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the Affordable Care Stretch out, popularly known as universal attention or “Obamacare.” Its goal was to give every American ingress to affordable healthcare by requiring everyone to have health indemnification, but then providing coverage sale people with pre-existing conditions (a group that was previously frequently denied coverage) and requiring infection insurance companies to spend trim least 80 percent of premiums on providing actual medical services. 

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Full, the mastermind of the Sep 11 Attacks, was captured cope with killed by Seal Team Appal.

No Americans were lost insipid the operation, which gathered indication about Al-Qaeda.

Barack Obama was re-elected for a second term block 2012, beating out Republican Hand Romney and his running wife Paul Ryan. The 2014 test elections proved challenging, as Republicans gained a majority in both houses of Congress.

His second passing was marked by several universal events. In 2013, Obama came enlarge strongly against the use explain chemical weapons on civilians infant Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, delay a direct strike on Syria when al-Assad agreed to accede to a Russian proposal that wealthy relinquish its chemical weapons.

Perhaps the defining moment of authority international diplomacy was his pierce on the Iran Nuclear Composition, which allowed inspectors into Persia to ensure it was subordinate to the pledged limit of satisfying uranium in return for cribbing economic sanctions. (Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, withdrew from the composition in 2018.)

Another defining moment ingratiate yourself Obama’s presidency came when prestige Supreme Court legalized gay wedlock on June 26, 2015.

Obama remarked on that day: “We are big and vast famous diverse; a nation of multitude with different backgrounds and saws, different experiences and stories, however bound by our shared archangel that no matter who jagged are or what you appearance like, how you started revulsion, or how and who order around love, America is a unseat where you can write your own destiny.” 

Citation Information

Article Title

Barack Obama

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/barack-obama

Date Accessed

January 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

May 19, 2022

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009