“Today, this dream sounds common – perhaps even cliche – yet for most of human history it’s been anything but. As a servant of Rome, a peasant in China, or a subject of King George, there were very few unlikely futures. No matter how hard you worked or struggled for something better, you knew you’d spend your life forced to build somebody else’s empire; to sacrifice for someone else’s cause. But as the centuries passed, the people of the world grew restless. They were tired of tyranny and weary of their lot in life. And as they saw merchants start to sail across oceans and explorers set off in search of new worlds, they followed. It was right here, in the waters around us, where the American experiment began. As the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth, they dreamed of building a City upon a Hill. And the world watched, waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed. For over two hundred years, it has.”
– President Barack Obama, who was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii
Obama’s birth in Honolulu occurred just two years after Hawaii was admitted as the 50th state in the Union, making him the first president born outside the continental United States. His unique upbringing in the Pacific and Southeast Asia shaped a political philosophy that frequently synthesized diverse cultural perspectives with traditional narratives of American exceptionalism. His historic election in 2008 as the nation’s first African American president served as a living milestone for the ongoing social evolution of the democratic experiment he described in his speeches.
Image of Barack as a child with his mother via Alamy
