DU Historians! What other Heads of Government have Lost Entire Cities?

[elehhhhna]

...and what happend to them?

Thanks in advance for weighing in.

[opihimoimoi]

1. TOJO< HITLER IDI AMIN, Nero, Caligula, Napoleon, and the

Confederate Prez during the Civil War....

[elehhhhna]

2. czar nicky

[Shipwack]

3. Jefferson

Lost DC during War of 1812 and it was burned to the ground by the British (no hard feelings, guys...)

How badly damaged was San Francisco during the quake and fire, or Chicago in the "Great Chicago Fire"?

German city of Dresden was burnt to the ground when it wa bombed by the Allies in WW2.

[Zynx]

4. Madison you mean. Jefferson was president until 1809.

[Shipwack]

11. DOH! Sorry... I blame the lack of coffee... nt

[HamdenRice]

5. Nero ? played guitar and ate cake while Rome burned -- err I mean fiddled

You mean not including war? So who lost a city to a disaster while not responding? You have to go back pretty far I guess. Nero comes to mind.

[TahitiNut]

6. Emperor Titus lost Pompeii, Herculaneum, and 7 other towns in 79 CE

It's that ol' "empire thing."

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. Who was in charge of the USSR during Chernobyl?

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[SheilaT]

9. Gorbachev.

And he remained in power until 1991.

But you're right, that's the only comparable loss of an entire city in modern times.

[GreenPartyVoter]

10. It's the only one I could think of that wasn't war-based. And to this day

I believe it is still a ghost town and will probably remain one for the rest of time.

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Then save the nation!
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[SheilaT]

8. I don't think you

can compare what's happened to New Orleans to any of the other examples already cited.

War is always a kind of special case, and even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not (so far as I know) totally evacuated after they were bombed. Certainly there's been comparable destruction to many cities in Europe and the far east during WWII, but none of them were rendered uninhabitable in the way New Orleans has.

And earlier comparisons, again, are simply so different and again don't have the uninhabitability factor that is really the essence of what's happened this time.

In a parliamentary system (what most other democracies have) I suspect the government would have fallen by now, with the major opposition party now in the process of forming a new government. But our system isn't like that, and to hope that Bush will be brought down by this seems to me naive.

[kevsand]

12. I suppose it's a matter of semantics.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in fact evacuated by the bomb, by which I mean that no one was left within a certain radius. As to habitability, doesn't radiation count?

And Pompeii and Herculaneum were by definition uninhabitable, being under lava and ash and whatnot. New Orleans and the coast are not permanently uninhabitable in the way that they were.

Seems like splitting hairs, to me. Bad is bad, and awful is worse.