Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb__ A Tour of Presidential Gravesites - Brian Lamb [79]
In 1985, he moved to Chicago, where he was a community organizer on the city’s south side, working to improve living conditions for the city’s poor. He attended Harvard Law School and was named the president of the Harvard Law Review. During this time, he met his future wife, Michelle, when he served as a summer associate at the law firm where she worked. They married in 1992 and now have two daughters: Sasha and Malia.
After law school, Mr. Obama returned to Chicago to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago and work as a civil rights lawyer. It was during this time he ran for the Illinois state senate, where he served for eight years representing Chicago’s south side. Barack Obama ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000; four years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. During that campaign Barack Obama was introduced to the nation when he was selected to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Barack Obama authored two bestselling books, Dreams from My Father (1995) and The Audacity of Hope (2006). In February 2007, he launched his presidential bid in a crowded democratic field that included former first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
President Obama’s private home in the Kenwood section of Chicago, Illinois. (Jeff Haynes/Polaris)
As it is still early in President Obama’s term, no public plans have been revealed for his presidential library. He does have a variety of locations to choose from, though, that have played a part in his past. With his close connections to Chicago, some are predicting that he will choose the University of Chicago, where he taught.
Afterword
by Presidential Historian Douglas Brinkley
We must have many Lincoln-hearted men.
A city is not builded in a day.
And they must do their work, and come and go,
While countless generations pass away.
—Vachel Lindsay, “Abraham Lincoln Walks At Midnight” (1914)
Whenever I took a group of college students on one of my “Majic Bus” academic treks across America in the 1990s, our primary goal was to study history where it happened and literature where it was created. We always made a pilgrimage to Abraham Lincoln’s Tomb in Springfield, Illinois. Much like Lincoln himself, there is something mournful in Springfield’s wholesome bond with our greatest president, as if generations of its denizens have remained in a state of perpetual sorrow over his shocking assassination just six days after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederate Army to Union Commander Ulysses S. Grant.
It was as if the people of Springfield had been attending a 138-year wake. The city’s downtown was a commercial monument to the martyr of the Civil War, whose likeness is everywhere: on savings and loan signs and fast food billboards, on restaurant menus and flea-market posters, on taxicab doors and bowling-alley walls. A riffle through the Springfield Yellow Pages turned up the Lincolnland Baptist Church and Lincoln Rent-a-Car, Lincoln Land Plumbing and Lincoln Pest Control, a Lincoln Chiropractic Clinic, and the Lincoln Dialysis Center. Yet despite this robust commerce, Springfield’s Lincoln was not the vigorous young rail-splitter of New Salem or the precocious country lawyer with the brooding eyes, big hands, and a book under each arm, but the dead president lain out in his Sunday best in a velvet-lined open coffin, arms folded across his chest, his face powdered, a small patch of dried blood in his hair—not the man, just the carcass he came in.
With the possible exception of John F. Kennedy’s death nearly a century later, Lincoln’s death on April