Ann Dunham
Stanley Ann Dunham was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She was the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Dunham’s research focused on women’s work on the island of Java and blacksmithing in Indonesia. To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
About Ann Dunham in brief
Stanley Ann Dunham was an American anthropologist who specialized in the economic anthropology and rural development of Indonesia. She was the mother of Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States. Dunham’s research focused on women’s work on the island of Java and blacksmithing in Indonesia. To address the problem of poverty in rural villages, she created microcredit programs while working as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Ancestry.com announced on July 30, 2012, after using a combination of old documents and yDNA analysis, that Dunham’s mother was descended from John Punch, an enslaved African man who lived in seventeenth-century colonial Virginia. Dunham was born on November 29, 1942, at Ascension Via Christi Hospital St. Francis in Wichita, Kansas, the only child of Madelyn Lee Payne and Stanley Armour Dunham. According to Dunham, she was named after her father because he wanted a son, though her relatives doubt this story. Her maternal uncle recalled that her mother named Dunham after her favorite actress Bette Davis’ character in the film In This Our Life because she thought Stanley, as a girl’s name, sounded sophisticated. As a child and teenager she was known as Stanley. Other children teased her about her name but she used it through high school, apologizing for it each time she introduced herself in a new town. Towards the latter part of her life, she worked with Bank Rakyat Indonesia, where she helped apply her research to the largest microfinance program in the world.
After her son was elected President, interest renewed in Dunham’s work. Posthumous interest has also led to the creation of The Ann Dunham Soetoro Endowment in the Anthropology Department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In an interview, Barack Obama referred to his mother as \”the dominant figure in my formative years . The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics\”. She was of predominantly English ancestry, with some Scottish, Welsh, Irish, German and Swiss. Wild Bill Hickok is her sixth cousin, five times removed. Her parents were born in Kansas and met in Wichita,. where they married on May 5, 1940. After World War II, Dunham’s family moved from Wichita to California while her father attended University of California, Berkeley. In 1955, the family moved to Seattle, where her father was employed as a furniture salesman and her mother worked as president of a bank. They lived in an apartment complex in the Wedgwood neighborhood where she attended Nathan Eckstein Junior High School. One classmate remembered her as ‘intellectually superior’ Dunham’s parents wanted their 13-year-old daughter to attend the newly opened Mercer Island High School, an Eastside suburb of Seattle, Washington. She then moved to Mercer Island, anEastside suburb, where they lived in a apartment complex where she was an avid reader.
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This page is based on the article Ann Dunham published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
