Jacques Cartier: Did you mean...?

A watercolour from 1933 showing Jacques Cartier visiting the village of Hochelaga on 3 October 1535. Hochelaga was an Iroquoian fortified village located on or near Mount Royal in present-day Montreal, Quebec. Arriving in 1535, Cartier was...

French explorer Jacques Cartier named Canada after "kanata," the Huron-Iroquois word for settlement. Learn more about his search for a passage to East Asia and how he laid the original French claim for Canada in this video.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a Swiss philosopher whose work both praised and criticised the Enlightenment movement. Although a believer in the power of reason, science, and the arts, Rousseau was convinced that a flourishing culture...

Jacques Necker (l. 1732-1804) was a Swiss banker and statesman who served as finance minister to King Louis XVI of France (r. 1774-1792). He served in the king's ministry three separate times, tasked with navigating France through its dire...

Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville (1754-1793) was a French journalist, abolitionist, and politician who played a prominent role in the French Revolution (1789-1799). A leader of the Girondins, a moderate political faction, Brissot was instrumental...

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880) was a composer of German birth who took French citizenship and became famous in Paris for his comic operettas, a genre he created, and for the more serious opera, The Tales of Hoffmann. A virtuoso cellist, conductor...

A portrait of Jaques Cartier (1491-1557 CE) a French-Breton maritime explorer. He was the first European who mapped the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the shores of the Saint Lawrence River. He was also the one who named these lands "The Country...

The European colonization of the Americas was the process by which European settlers populated the regions of North, Central, South America, and the islands of the Caribbean. It is also recognized as the direct cause for the cultures of the...

A pastel portrait by Maurice Quentin de La Tour of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). (Musée Antoine-Lécuyer, Saint-Quentin, France)

A 1766 oil on canvas portrait by Allan Ramsay of the Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh)