Obama History

Obama was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, the first President to have been born in Hawaii. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas. Of mostly English descent, her family also traces to Germany, Wales and Ireland; his great-great-great grandfather was born in County Offaly. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Lou from Nyang'oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married on February 2, 1961, separated when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University on scholarship, and 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 Menteng neighborhood 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 SchoolPunahou 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 went back 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.Barack Obama and half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, with their mother Ann Dunham and grandfather Stanley Dunham, in Hawaii (early 1970s)Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me-that he was black as pitch, my... [continues]

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