Barack+Obama



Obama is a graduate of [|Columbia University] and [|Harvard Law School], where he was the president of the //[|Harvard Law Review]// and where he received a doctorate in law. He was a [|community organizer] in [|Chicago] before earning his law degree. He worked as a [|civil rights] attorney in Chicago and taught [|constitutional law] at the [|University of Chicago Law School] from 1992 to 2004. Obama served three terms in the [|Illinois Senate] from 1997 to 2004. Following an unsuccessful bid for a seat in the [|U.S. House of Representatives] in 2000, he ran for United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 [|Democratic primary] election for the [|United States Senator from Illinois] and his prime-time televised [|keynote address] at the [|Democratic National Convention] in July 2004. He won [|election to the U.S. Senate] in November 2004. Obama's presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after [|a close campaign] in the [|2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries] against [|Hillary Rodham Clinton], he won his party's nomination. In [|the 2008 general election], he defeated [|Republican] nominee [|John McCain] and was [|inaugurated as president] on January 20, 2009. Obama is also the [|2009 Nobel Peace Prize] [|laureate].
 * Barack Hussein Obama II** born August 4, 1961 is the [|44th] and [|current] President of the United States. He is the [|first] [|African American] to hold the office. Obama previously served as the [|junior] [|United States Senator] from [|Illinois], from January 2005 until he resigned after [|his election] to the presidency in November 2008.

Barack Obama was born at [|Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital] in [|Honolulu], [|Hawaii], United States,to [|Stanley Ann Dunham], an American of predominantly English descent from [|Wichita, Kansas],and [|Barack Obama, Sr.], a [|Luo] from [|Nyang’oma Kogelo], [|Nyanza Province], [|Kenya Colony]. Obama is the first President to have been born in [|Hawaii]. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a [|Russian language] class at the [|University of Hawaii at Mānoa], where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married on February 2, 1961,and Barack was born later that year. His parents separated when he was two years old and they divorced in 1964. Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.



Barack Obama was born at [|Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital] in [|Honolulu], [|Hawaii], United States,to [|Stanley Ann Dunham], an American of predominantly English descent from [|Wichita, Kansas], and [|Barack Obama, Sr.], a [|Luo] from [|Nyang’oma Kogelo], [|Nyanza Province], [|Kenya Colony]. Obama is the first President to have been born in [|Hawaii]. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a [|Russian language] class at the [|University of Hawaii at Mānoa], where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married on February 2, 1961,and Barack was born later that year. His parents separated when he was two years old and they divorced in 1964. Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982. After her divorce, Dunham married [|Indonesian] student [|Lolo Soetoro], who was attending college in Hawaii. When [|Suharto], a military leader in Soetoro's home country, [|came to power] in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the island nation. They lived in the [|Menteng] area of [|Jakarta]. From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in [|Jakarta], including [|Besuki Public School] and St. Francis of Assisi School. In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, [|Madelyn] and [|Stanley Armour Dunham], and attended [|Punahou School], a private [|college preparatory school], from the fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979. Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she relocated to Indonesia to work as an [|anthropological] field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year before dying of [|ovarian cancer].

Following high school, Obama moved to [|Los Angeles] in 1979 to attend [|Occidental College]. After two years he transferred in 1981 to [|Columbia University] in [|New York City], where he majored in [|political science] with a specialization in [|international relations] and graduated with a [|B.A.] in 1983. He worked for a year at the [|Business International Corporation], then at the [|New York Public Interest Research Group].



After four years in New York City, Obama moved to Chicago, where he was hired as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland ([|Roseland], [|West Pullman] and [|Riverdale]) on Chicago's far [|South Side]. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988. During his three years as the DCP's director, its staff grew from one to thirteen and its annual budget grew from $70,000 to $400,000. He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in [|Altgeld Gardens].Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the [|Gamaliel Foundation], a community organizing institute. 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. He returned in August 2006 in a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near [|Kisumu] in rural western Kenya. In late 1988, Obama entered [|Harvard Law School]. He was selected as an editor of the //Harvard Law Review// at the end of his first year,and president of the journal in his second year. 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. After graduating with a [|Juris Doctor (J.D.)] [|//magna cum laude//] from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago. Obama's election as the [|first black president of the //Harvard Law Review//] gained national media attention and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations, which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as //[|Dreams from My Father]//.