Barack Obama Research Paper

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Pages: 5

America's forty-fourth president, Barack Obama, was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His father was Barack Obama Sr., who was from Kenya, Africa, and his mother was Ann Dunham, a white woman from a small town in Kansas. Dunham was an eighteen-year-old student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa when she met Obama Sr. in a Russian class. An economics major, he was five years older than Dunham. Widely regarded as possessing a brilliant intellect, he was the first African student to attend the University of Hawaii. He had been sent by the Kenyan government (at that time under British colonial rule) on a scholarship.

When young Barack was two years old, his father won a scholarship to Harvard University. However, the scholarship did not provide enough compensation to support a family, so Obama Sr. decided to leave his family behind and attend Harvard alone. He received his PhD in 1964 and then felt compelled to return to Kenya. He wanted to use his Western education to help modernize the nation, which had won its
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Obama Sr. was always presented as a larger-than-life figure, an honest and self-confident man with a very forceful personality. But stories were no substitute for knowing him in person, and Obama writes in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, that his father "remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man" (p. 5). In a Newsweek profile published in 2008 after Obama had won the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama was quoted as saying, "Something's got to be driving you, and in my case if you have somebody that is absent, maybe you feel like you've got something to prove when you're young, and that pattern sets itself up over time. But also because, again in my case, the stories I heard about my father painted him as larger than life, which also meant that I felt I had something to live up