David Mazella is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Houston. He has published the Making of Modern Cynicism (University of Virginia Press, 2007) and articles on Sterne, Lillo, Hobbes, Swift, Hume, and the genres of the Lucianic Dialogue of the Dead and Hans Sloane’s History of Jamaica. He gratefully acknowledges the support this 1771 Project and website have received from the UH Department of English’s Houstoun fund, the UH DOR Special Project Grants, UH Provost REACH and CITE programs, and University of Houston Digital Core Facility. The 1771 dataset began as a spinoff of the monograph he is writing about the literary and cultural history of a single year.