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Barack Hussein Obama is an American political politician who served as the 44th President of the United States from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American to be elected president. Served as a U.S. Senator in Illinois.

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Barack Hussein Obama II was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961. Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama Sr. grew up herding goats in Africa and eventually earned a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya and pursue his dreams of going to college in Hawaii.
Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was born on an Army base in Wichita, Kansas, during World War II. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dunham's father, Stanley, enlisted in the military and marched across Europe in General George Patton's army. Dunham's mother, Madelyn, went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, the couple studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program and, after several moves, ended up in Hawaii.

While studying at the University of Hawaii at Manoah, Obama Sr. met fellow student Ann Dunham. They married on February 2, 1961, and Barack II was born six months later.

His father left soon after his birth, and the couple divorced two years later. In 1965, Dunham married Lolo Soetoro, a University of Hawaii student from Indonesia. A year later, the family moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro Ng, was born in 1970. Several incidents in Indonesia left Dunham afraid for her son's safety and education so, at the age of 10, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. His mother and half-sister later joined them.
As a child, Obama did not have a relationship with his father. When his son was still an infant, Obama Sr. relocated to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University and pursue a Ph.D. Obama's parents officially separated several months later and ultimately divorced in March 1964, when their son was two. Soon after, Obama Sr. returned to Kenya.

Obama struggled with the absence of his father during his childhood, who he saw only once more after his parents divorced when Obama Sr. visited Hawaii for a short time in 1971. "[My father] had left paradise, and nothing that my mother or grandparents told me could obviate that single, unassailable fact," he later reflected. "They couldn't describe what it might have been like had he stayed."

While living with his grandparents, Obama enrolled in the esteemed Punahou Academy. He excelled in basketball and graduated with academic honors in 1979. As one of only three Black students at the school, he became conscious of racism and what it meant to be African American.

Obama later described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage with his own sense of self: "I noticed that there was nobody like me in the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog. . .and that Santa was a white man," he wrote. "I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror with all my senses and limbs seemingly intact, looking as I had always looked, and wondered if something was wrong with me."

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Obama entered Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1979. After two years, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 1983 with a degree in political science. He graduated magna laude from Harvard Law in 1991.
After graduating from Columbia University as an undergrad, Obama worked in the business sector for two years. He moved to Chicago in 1985, where he worked on the impoverished South Side as a community organizer for low-income residents in the Roseland and the Altgeld Gardens communities.

It was during this time that Obama, who said he "was not raised in a religious household," joined the Trinity United Church of Christ. He also visited relatives in Kenya, and paid an emotional visit to the graves of his biological father, who died in a car accident in November 1982, and paternal grandfather.

"For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept," Obama wrote. "I saw that my life in America — the Black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago — all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away."

Returning from Kenya with a sense of renewal, Obama entered Harvard Law School in 1988. The next year, he met with constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe. Their discussion so impressed Tribe, that when Obama asked to join his team as a research assistant, the professor agreed.

“The better he did at Harvard Law School and the more he impressed people, the more obvious it became that he could have had anything,“ said Professor Tribe in a 2012 interview with Frontline, “but it was clear that he wanted to make a difference to people, to communities.”

In 1989, Obama joined the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin as a summer associate, where he met his future wife Michelle. In February 1990, Obama was elected the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review.

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Marriage to Michelle Obama and Daughters

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Marriage to Michelle Obama and Daughters

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Obama met Michelle Robinson, a young lawyer who was assigned to be his adviser at the Chicago law firm of Sidley Austin. Not long after, the couple began dating. On October 3, 1992, he and Michelle were married.

They moved to Kenwood, on Chicago's South Side. Barack and Michelle Obama welcomed two daughters several years later: Malia (born 1998) and Sasha (born 2001).

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Barack Obama Reveals What Daughters Sasha and Malia Are REALLY Like!

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Obama published his autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, in 1995. The work received high praise from literary figures such as Toni Morrison. It has since been printed in more than 25 languages, including Chinese, Swedish and Hebrew. The book had a second printing in 2004 and was adapted for a children's version.

The audiobook version of Dreams, narrated by Obama, received a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word album in 2006

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Barack Obama - Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance