- published: 10 Jun 2014
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Alphonso Taft (November 5, 1810 – May 21, 1891) was the Attorney General and Secretary of War under President Ulysses S. Grant and the founder of an American political dynasty. He was the father of U.S. President William Howard Taft.
Born in Townshend, Vermont, the son of Peter Rawson Taft of the powerful Taft family, he graduated from Yale College in 1833, where he also was a tutor 1835-37. At Yale, he and his classmate William Huntington Russell cofounded Skull and Bones, the preeminent senior society. He subsequently studied law at the Yale Law School, was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1838, moved to Cincinnati in 1839 where he was a member of the Cincinnati City Council, and became one of the most influential citizens of Ohio. He was a member of the boards of trustees of the University of Cincinnati and of Yale College.
He was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1856, and also that year made an unsuccessful run for the United States House of Representatives against George H. Pendleton. He was a judge of the Superior Court of Cincinnati from 1866 to 1872 when he resigned to practise law with two of his sons. He was the first president of the Cincinnati Bar Association, serving in 1872. At a famous 1874 Taft family reunion at Elmshade, at Uxbridge, Mass., Alphonso delivered an impassioned speech on his family history and his father's origins in this community, as recorded in his biography.
Barack Hussein Obama II (i/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.
Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama 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 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 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. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against 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. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.