Quebec historical timeline

Chronology

1. c. 9000 BC — Paleo-Indians establish themselves in what becomes Quebec, arriving after the Laurentide Ice Sheet melted roughly 11,000 years ago.
2. 1534 — Jacques Cartier lands at Gaspé on 24 July, the first European to map the area, and on his 1535 voyage names the Stadacona district Canada. The country's name comes from a misunderstood Iroquoian word for a village.
3. 1608 — Samuel de Champlain founds the Habitation de Québec on 3 July, and it becomes the capital of New France. Old Québec is built on that site and is the only walled city north of Mexico.
4. 1663 — New France becomes a royal province, governed directly from Paris rather than by a trading company.
5. 1759–1763 — British forces take Quebec City in 1759 and Montreal in 1760, and France cedes the colony in the Treaty of Paris in 1763. A French-speaking Catholic population passes to a Protestant English-speaking empire, which is the fact the next 260 years are organised around.
6. 1791 — Britain divides the Province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada, giving Loyalist settlers English common law in the west while Lower Canada keeps French civil law and the seigneurial system. Quebec still uses civil law where the rest of Canada uses common law.
7. 1867 — The colony enters Confederation as the province of Quebec, with Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau as its first premier.
8. 1912 — The Quebec Boundaries Extension Act adds the District of Ungava, taking the province to the Hudson Strait and giving it the borders it has now.
9. 1960s — The Quiet Revolution. The Liberals campaign in 1962 on Maîtres chez nous, and in 1967 the National Assembly puts every Quebec university on a statutory footing financed from public taxes. René Lévesque, one of its architects, later leads the first modern sovereignist government.
10. 1980 and 1995 — Two sovereignty referendums, both of which fail to win a majority. The second is why the constitutional question is treated as settled-but-not-closed.