Question

BIOGRAPHY / AUTOBIOGRAPHY PROJECT: WHO WOULD YOU PICK FROM YOU TEXT TO BE YOUR MENTOR?

INSTRUCTIONS

You will complete a short Biography of a historic person you admire from our class text / time.

You will also complete an Autobiography using the same parameters, which are on a TEMPLATE, below.

History has been often presented as repeating itself. This tragedy leading to that tragedy, and so on. There has been much of this. However, history is just as much a series of triumphs over those tragedies. It is all in your perspective – your identity. Is your identity one of being a victim, or a victor? In this project, you will select an individual – one person you admire – and examine their life as evidence of their “Identity of Power” in history. Why do you know them? What were their struggles? How were they similar to your own? How did theirs differ from yours? You will need to include the information below for both you and your chosen history mentor. They are not meant to be long rambling details about the Identity of Power, but are meant instead to be a window into how a famous (or not so famous) person solved a key problem of life experience in history.

How did the two lives (yours and theirs) contribute to HUMAN RIGHTS? How did they re-define RACE? What impact did they have on GENDER, and/or how did GENDER roles affect their lives? Discuss them in relation to CLASS. Were they more affected by RACE, GENDER or CLASS? What were their struggles? How were they similar? How did they differ? You will need to include the information below.

Give me 2-to-3 focused logical typed pages – TOTAL – for both the Autobiography and the Biography. Support any and all assertions in your comparisons/contrasts with historical documents (books, articles, etc.). You are your sources. Use no more than one electronic source that does not come from a book/article. Your finished project paper will include a five-source bibliography. Your textbook counts. Spelling and grammar count. Try to fit each Autobiography / Biography onto a single page for each Identity using the guidelines below (between the double lines).


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IDENTITY OF POWER TEMPLATE
1. Name of the person.
2. Birth and death specifics (place, and any distinguishing facts).
3. Early formative influences.
4. Education – formal and informal.
5. Adult life.
6. What did they do (or, you do now) - what is the economic base?
7. Politics
8. Relationships and associations.
9. Creative life.
10. Major accomplishments.
11. Historical significance compared to dimensions of complete life – i.e., what did they do that you admired, and what are you intending to do?

Answer 1

Barack Obama who is known in full as Barack Hussein Obama II was the third African American to elected since the end of reconstruction (1877). He was born on August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. His parents who met at University of Hawaii were Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia ... "I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child." Later on his mother sent him back to Hawaii to live with her parents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham!

Launching the church-funded Developing Communities Project and, in particular, organising Altgeld Gardens residents to put pressure on Chicago's city hall to improve conditions in the poorly maintained public housing project was Obama's primary organising task. Some of his efforts were successful, but he came to the conclusion that, in the face of a challenging city bureaucracy "I just can't get things done here without a law degree".

Obama entered at Harvard Law School in 1988, where he excelled academically and graduated with honours. In 1990–1991 he was elected president of the esteemed Harvard Law Review. Obama was a leftist, but he won the election by convincing the conservative staffers of the newspaper that he would treat their views properly, which he is largely credited for doing. Obama attracted much media attention as the first African American president in the lengthy history of the legal review and received a contract from Random House to write a book about racial relations.