Key events in Barack Obama's life and career

WASHINGTON — President Barack Hussein Obama's long, winding path to the White House was strewn with a mix of personal and social obstacles, victories and defeats, comebacks and come-uppances. A summary of key points in his life, his quest for the presidency and key themes and goals he's articulated while in the White House:

Aug. 4, 1961: Barack Hussein Obama is born in Hawaii to a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas.

His mother is Stanley (her father wanted a boy) Ann Dunham. The Kenyan-born father is Barack Obama Sr. They met at the University of Hawaii, got married and had a son, Barack — "blessed" in Arabic. The father departs two years later to study at Harvard. He returned just once when his son was 10.

1967: Obama moves from Hawaii with his mother to Jakarta, Indonesia. He returns to the United States when he is 10, and lives with his grandparents in Hawaii. He spends much of his youth struggling with questions about his racial identity — and an African father he barely knew. He acknowledges he experimented with drugs in his teen years, a revelation made in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." At Occidental College in Los Angeles, he started using his given name, Barack, instead of Barry — and took his first plunge into politics, speaking at an anti-apartheid rally. Obama later transfers from the small liberal arts college to Columbia University in New York. "I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk," he would say years later in an interview with Columbia alumni magazine.

1983: Obama graduates with a political science degree and holds various jobs in New York. It was there he received a call from an aunt in Nairobi notifying him his father had been killed in an auto accident. The news eventually led Obama on a journey to Kenya and a tearful visit to his father's grave. After New York, Obama heads to Chicago, where he knew no one. He starts out there as a $12,000-a-year community organizer, walking the run-down streets of the South Side that had been decimated by the loss of steel mills and factory jobs.

1988: Obama makes giant leap from the South Side to Harvard Law School, the training ground for America's elite. He made history there, two years later, as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, perhaps the most prestigious law journal in the nation. After his first year, Obama was a summer associate at a corporate law firm in Chicago where his adviser was Michelle Robinson, another Harvard law graduate and a product of a working-class family. They subsequently marry and have two daughters, Malia, now 10, and Sasha, 8.