Barack Obama

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, the only United States president born outside the contiguous United States. He became the 44th president of the United States, serving from 2009 to 2017, and was the first African American to hold the office. A member of the Democratic Party, he entered the presidency during a period marked by the 2008 financial crisis, continuing wars, debates over health care, and major shifts in American social and foreign policy.

Obama’s early life crossed places and cultures. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and his father, Barack Hussein Obama, was a Luo Kenyan from Nyang’oma Kogelo. His parents met at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and divorced when Obama was young. As a child, he lived in Hawaii, spent time in Seattle, and moved to Indonesia with his mother and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, when he was six. He later described struggling as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.

After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled at Harvard Law School, where he became the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review. He went on to work as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. Those roles placed him close to community politics, civil rights law, and constitutional debate before he held national office.

Obama was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996, representing the 13th district from 1997 to 2004. He then represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 2005 to 2008. In the 2008 presidential election, after a close Democratic primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, he chose Joe Biden as his running mate and defeated Republican nominee John McCain and his running mate Sarah Palin. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for efforts in international diplomacy, a decision that drew both praise and criticism.

As president, Obama’s first term included the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a partial extension of the Bush tax cuts, health care reform legislation, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. He appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, with Sotomayor becoming the first Hispanic American on the Court. He oversaw the end of the Iraq War, ordered Operation Neptune Spear, expanded air strikes and use of special forces, and ordered the 2011 military intervention in Libya to implement a United Nations Security Council resolution.

Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012 and served a second term that included advocacy for gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change, an executive order to limit carbon emissions, implementation of the Affordable Care Act, sanctions against Russia, military intervention in Iraq after gains by ISIL, the Iran nuclear agreement, and normalized relations with Cuba. He also promoted inclusion for LGBTQ Americans and became the first sitting U.S. president to publicly support same-sex marriage. Since leaving office in 2017, he has remained politically active and has published three books: Dreams from My Father, The Audacity of Hope, and A Promised Land. His words continue to draw readers because they come from a public life shaped by law, organizing, elected office, and the pressures of the presidency.