Cornel winding biography of barack obama

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44thpresident of the United States of America from 2009 to 2017. Born in Hawaii, the son of a Kenyan father and a mother from Kansas, he won the 2008 presidential election and was re-elected president in November 2012. A member of the U.S. Democratic Party, he was the first African American president. Before becoming president, he represented the 13th district for three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004 and served as United States senator from Illinois between January 4, 2005 and November 16, 2008. While president, he was the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

See also his books:

Dreams from My Father (1995)

The Audacity of Hope (2006)

A Promised Land (2020)

Quotes

• My confidence in our shared future is grounded in my respect for India’s treasured past—a civilization that has been shaping the world for thousands of years. Indians unlocked the intricacies of the human body and the vastness of our universe. And it is no exaggeration to say that our information age is rooted in Indian innovations—including the number zero.... Instead of succumbing to division, you have shown that the strength of India—the very idea of India—is its embrace of all colours, castes and creeds … It’s the richness of faiths celebrated by a visitor to my hometown of Chicago more than a century ago—the renowned Swami Vivekananda...India not only opened our minds, she expanded our moral imaginations. With religious texts that still summon the faithful to lives of dignity and discipline. With a poet who imagined a future ’Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’—and with a man whose message of love and justice endures—the father of your nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
  • Barack Obama. Quoted from Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House. [1]

1980s

• In regard to homosexuality, I must s

History Will Be Very Kind

History Will Eviscerate Him

Historians Weigh In on Obama

The 53 Complete Questionnaires

“It’s a fool’s errand you’re involved in,” warned Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood when approached recently by this magazine to predict Barack Obama’s historical legacy. “We live in a fog, and historians decades from now will tell their society what was happening in 2014. But we don’t know the future. No one in 1952, for example, could have predicted the reputation of Truman a half-century or so later.”

Wood is right, of course. Historians are experts on the past, not the future. But sometimes the wide-angle perspective they inhabit can be useful in understanding the present. And so, on the eve of Obama’s penultimate State of the Union address, we invited a broad range of historians — academic and popular — to play a game.

Over the past few weeks, New York asked more than 50 historians to respond to a broad questionnaire about how Obama and his administration will be viewed 20 years from now. After the day-to-day crises and flare-ups and legislative brinkmanship are forgotten, what will we remember? What, and who, will have mattered most? What small piece of legislation (or executive inaction) will be seen by future generations as more consequential than today’s dominant news stories? What did Obama miss about America? What did we (what will we) miss about him?

Almost every respondent wrote that the fact of his being the first black president will loom large in the historical narrative — though they disagreed in interesting ways. Many predict that what will last is the symbolism of a nonwhite First Family; others, the antagonism Obama’s blackness provoked; still others, the way his racial self-consciousness constrained him. A few suggested that we

A Promised Land, by Barack Obama (Crown, 758 pp., $45)

When President Barack Obama called House Speaker John Boehner, Obama’s proclivity to lecture Boehner was so predictable that the Speaker would often put down the phone, light a cigarette, and take a long draft as he waited for Obama to finish. For most readers of Obama’s new memoir, A Promised Land, the former president’s passages on policy will make you sympathize with Boehner. In the introduction to nearly every key policy addressed by his presidency, Obama unleashes multi-page lectures, winding through the history of post-Soviet Russia, the evolution of health-care policy in the United States, and the origins of the State of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

This is not to say that the book is bad or boring. Obama is an engaging writer—or at least his collaborator, former speechwriter Cody Keenan, is—and the story, especially his rise from humble beginnings to the presidency, is fascinating. While the origin story also appears in his first book, Dreams from My Father, it is worth rereading here, as Obama now tells it with the knowledge of someone who knows where the story goes, as opposed to the youthful uncertainty of Dreams.

And the tale retold bears some differences: fewer mentions of his TV-watching habits and his pot-smoking friends, more mentions of his cigarette-smoking habit and his efforts to quit. He eventually does quit, upon the passage of his health-care legislation, but the frequent references to smoking are jarring in the light of the way cigarettes are now so much more socially unacceptable than they were when he first wrote Dreams (see sidebar).

The bulk of the new material, though, is about Obama’s political career, particularly the 2008 presidential campaign and the first few years of his presidency (the book ends with the killing of Osama Bin Laden, which took place on May 2, 2011). A second and possibly third memoir are to follow, w

This is a transcript from an earlier broadcast of this episode, there may be slight differences in wording.

PETER: This is BackStory. I’m Peter Onuf. In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico on what were essentially trumped up charges of having been attacked. The real goal was to get California, and maybe even some territory south of the Rio Grande while we are at it. The longer the war dragged on, the more unpopular it became.

AMY GREENBERG: This is a war that’s not started out of any principal at all. It simply started out of a desire for more land. And yet when the soldiers get down there, they don’t like the land, and they don’t like the people.

PETER: Today on the show, we’re looking at the ways Americans have and haven’t managed to bring the wars they fought to a close. The ends of wars have often seemed messy at the time, only to be cleaned up by subsequent generations looking back.

MICHAEL GORMAN: Then I have the actors up there on the [? porch, ?] and I’m trying to figure out some combination of gestures that I can have these guys do that would fit and look good. Because that’s a consideration when you’re on a film set. Not what happened, it’s what will sell.

PETER: The history of wars’ endings. Today on BackStory. Major funding for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

BRIAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory with the American Backstory hosts. Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh, 20th Century Guy. And I’m here with Ed Ayers.

ED: I be the 19th Century Guy.

BRIAN: And Peter Onuf’s bringing up the rear.

PETER: 18th Century Guy.

[APPLAUSE]

GEORGE W. BUSH: Thank you all very much Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans. Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies ha