Carter, shown at age 6 with his sister Gloria, was born James Earl Carter Jr. in Plains, Georgia in 1924. Him and his three siblings were raised in rural Georgia, where electricity was rare and mule-drawn wagons were common.
State Sen. Carter hugs his wife at his gubernatorial campaign headquarters in Atlanta in September 1966. He served two terms as a state senator and one each as governor and president.
Carter takes the oath of office at the Georgia State Capitol on Jan. 21, 1971, becoming the state’s 76th governor. “I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over,” he said in his inaugural address.
Carter holds a copy of the Milwaukee Sentinel in April 1976 that says he lost the previous night’s Wisconsin primary to Arizona Rep. Mo Udall (he did not). Victory and concession speeches had been made; so had several predictions by major news outlets.
Carter shows off his catch during an August 1976 fishing trip on his property in Plains, Georgia. The Carters were fishing with nets because the pond had been drained to manage the fish population.
Carter speaks with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (right) during a summit at Camp David on Sept. 6, 1978. The trio hammered out the Camp David Accords during the summit, ending the war between Israel and Egypt.
Carter jogs at Prairie Du Chien High School in Wisconsin in August 1979. The previous morning, he jogged aboard the steamboat he was vacationing on, but fellow passengers complained about the noise. So, he took to the land and ran 4 miles, according to The Washington Post.
Carter bows his head during a prayer service at Washington Cathedral on Nov. 15, 1979, for the hostages being held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran. To his right are Vice President Walter Mondale and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Carter watches as a man dumps ashes from a bag during a briefing on the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) II treaty at the White House, on Nov. 29, 1979. The president continued the briefing after the man was removed by a Secret Service agent.
By 1982, the Carters had left the White House and politics. But the presidency — and Secret Service agents — kept following them, even on this Caribbean cruise.
Cuban President Fidel Castro calls for time as Carter prepares to throw the first pitch in a baseball game in Havana on May 14, 2002. At that time, Carter was the only American leader – in or out of office – to visit Cuba since Castro’s 1959 revolution.
Prior to the Nobel banquet in Oslo, Norway in December 2002, Nobel Peace Prize winner Carter and his wife greet well-wishers during a torchlight procession. The prize was awarded to Carter for his decades of effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts and advance democracy and human rights.