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Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaii where his father was a foreign student on scholarship. The couple married in Wailuku on Maui on February 2, 1961, and separated when Obama's mother moved with her newborn son to Seattle, Washington in late August 1961 to attend the University of Washington for one year. The couple divorced in March 1964. Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964 and remarried, visiting his son in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982. The President's mother passed away in 1995 in Hawaii from ovarian and uterine cancer.
Barack Obama is the first African American to serve as President. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate and served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.
Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his upset victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004.
After serving in the US Senate for just over two years, his presidential campaign formally began in February 2007. After a hard fought campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other major domestic policy initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, and the Budget Control Act of 2011.
In foreign policy, Obama ended the Iraq War, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. military involvement in Libya, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden. In May 2012, he became the first sitting U.S. president to openly support legalizing same-sex marriage.