Barack Hussein Obama

Early life

• Barack Obama was born to a white American mother, Ann Dunham, and a black Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr.
• They were both young college students at the University of Hawaii. 
• When his father left for Harvard, Barack Obama and his mother stayed behind
• His father ultimately returned alone to Kenya, where he worked as a government economist. 
• Barack's mother remarried an Indonesian oil manager and moved to Jakarta when Barack was six. 
• He later recounted Indonesia as simultaneously lush and poor.
• He returned to Hawaii, where he was brought up largely by his grandparents. 
• The family lived in a small apartment - his grandfather was a furniture salesman and an unsuccessful insurance agent and his grandmother worked in a bank.
• Barack managed to get into Punahou School, Hawaii's top prep academy. 
• His father wrote to him regularly but, though he traveled around the world on official business for Kenya, he visited only once, when Barack was ten.

University and Politics

• Obama attended Columbia University, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations and graduated with a B.A. in 1983.
• After four years in New York City, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Greater Roseland  on Chicago's far South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988
• He spent these three years helping poor South Side residents cope with a wave of plant closings.
• He then attended Harvard Law School, and in 1990 became the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review. 
• He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School, and married Michelle Robinson, a fellow attorney. 
• Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, succeeding State Senator Alice Palmer as Senator from Illinois's 13th District, which at that time spanned Chicago South Side neighborhoods from Hyde Park – Kenwood south to South Shore and west to Chicago Lawn

President

• In 2004 Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat, representing Illinois, and he gained national attention by giving a rousing and well-received keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. 
• On February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president of the United States in front of the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois The choice of the announcement site was viewed as symbolic because it was also where Abraham Lincoln delivered his historic "House Divided" speech in 1858. Throughout the campaign, Obama emphasized the issues of rapidly ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence and providing universal health care.
• A large number of candidates entered the Democratic Party presidential primaries. The field narrowed to a duel between Obama and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
• On June 3, with all states counted, Obama was named the presumptive nominee and delivered a victory speech in St. Paul, Minnesota. Clinton ended her campaign and endorsed him on June 7, 2008.
• Obama proceeded to focus on the general election campaign against Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.
• Barack Obama won the race for presidency. In January 2009, he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States, and the first African-American ever elected to that position.