- Barack Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, two years after it became a U.S. state. His mother was a U.S. citizen and his father a native of Kenya. Barack Sr. left Hawaii to go back to Kenya when his son was two years old. After his parents' divorce, Barack's mother married an Indonesian native and took her son to live in that country until he was ten. Obama then returned to Hawaii, coming of age under the guidance of his maternal grandparents.
- Obama enrolled in Occidential College in Los Angeles, CA and spent two years there before transferring to Columbia University in New York City. He graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in Political Science in 1983. After five years working as a community organizer and social worker in New York City and Chicago, he entered Harvard Law School in 1988. He became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990 and earned his law degree in 1991.
- After Harvard, Obama moved back to Chicago and began his political career. Utilizing connections from his community organizing days, he mobilized a group of supporters to help him mount a run for the Illinois legislature. He won his first election in 1996 and served for eight years in the Illinois state house as a senator. In 2000, he ran in the Democratic primary for an Illinois seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and lost.
- In 2004, Obama was selected to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. At the time, there was an Illinois U.S. Senate seat that was in contention and Obama, whose political star was rising in the state, was given a national platform at the convention. His speech at the convention made him a national political figure overnight and he handily won the U.S .Senate seat. Speculation soon started that he might run for president in 2008. He formally announced his candidacy on February 10th, 2007.
- Obama won the Iowa caucus in January 2008, defeating front-runners Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. He ended up winning a majority of the Democratic primaries and was nominated for President at the national convention in Denver in August 2008. He chose his campaign rival and senate colleague Joe Biden as his vice-presidential running mate. On November 4th, 2008, they defeated the Republican ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin in the U.S. presidential election. On January 20th, 2009, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African-American to hold that office.
- Obama met his wife, Michelle, in 1989 when he was a summer associate at a Chicago law firm where she worked full time. They soon began dating and were married in October, 1992. Their first daughter, Malia, was born in 1998 and their second, Sasha, was born in 2001. Michelle Obama said in a 2008 TV interview that her and her husband do not plan on having any more children. Barack Obama's mother-in-law, Marian Robinson, is Malia and Sasha's only surviving grandparent. She moved into the White House with the First Family in January 2009, becoming the first live-in grandparent there since the Eisenhower administration.
