Revolutions of 1848 immigration, especially from Germany. This, in turn, fuelled the nativist "Know Nothing" movement in the years preceding the American Civil War. The "Know Nothings" were opposed to Catholic immigration, especially immigration of German and Irish Catholics, and held Pope Pius IX responsible for the 1848 revolutions' failure. 1848 in Canada saw the establishment of responsible government in Nova Scotia and The Canadas, the first such governments in the British Empire outside of Great Britain itself. John Ralston Saul has argued that this development is tied to the revolutions in Europe, but described the Canadian approach to the revolutionary year of
Lists of Merriam-Webster's Words of the Year to breaking news stories and world events in 2003. The top word "democracy" correlated to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, "quarantine" to a SARS epidemic, and "matrix" to the film "The Matrix Revolutions". In 2004, blogs were becoming highly popular and began to influence mainstream media. During the twelve-month period that decides the word of the year, the term "blog" had the most requests for a definition or explanation, so a new entry was placed in Merriam-Webster's printed dictionary for 2005. The other words on this list, such as "incumbent", "electoral", and "partisan", were