Meet the Moderators: Dr. Bill Wiggins, Cliosult Inc.
Bill Wiggins is one of the moderators for the “Rendering of American Indian Images”
“Juxtaposition and Parallelism(s): Native American Indians and Africans in British North America.” Imagery and the history of Native American Indians and Africans in British North America share many parallels when juxtaposed. This reality will be chronologically described/presented and examined.
Meet the Moderators: Dr. Stephanie Richmond
Dr. Stephanie Richmond is one of the moderators of the “Becoming American and the Spirit Voice: Identity Politics, Gender and Religion” panel. Dr. Stephanie Richmond is an assistant professor of history at Norfolk State University. She teaches courses on US history before 1877, including classes on African-American history, women’s history and reform. She is currently working on her first book, a study of the intersection of gender roles and the middle class in the anti-slavery movement in the US and Britain. In her spare time, she dabbles in traditional women’s crafts such as spinning and baking artisanal bread. Dr. Richmond’s talk focuses on the class divisions between women in the colonial Chesapeake and how women related to one another across racial lines, sharing foodways, medicinal knowledge and household duties and in the process created a uniquely American culture in the home. She starts her talk by examining the folk song “The Trappan’d Maiden or the Distressed Damsel,” a seventeenth century song about the life of an indentured servant woman in Virginia. These working women, black, white and native American, had much more in common with one another than they did with the wives of the planters, and shared amongst themselves recipes, knowledge and support, creating a working female world in the Chesapeake.
Anadama bread is a traditional colonial bread recipe that combines wheat flour with cornmeal and molasses. It got its name, according to legend, when a woman, named Anna, left her husband alone and only left him some cornmeal mush mixed with molasses. He added flour, yeast and salt to create this bread, and muttered ‘Anna damn her” while baking it. Genteel Yankees then changed the name to Anadama, playing on the New Englander’s penchant for dropping the final “r” from words.
Meet the Moderators: Jason Roberts on the Dismal Swamp
Jason Roberts is one of the moderators for the “The Creolization of America: Beyond Black, White and Red.” 
Jason Roberts is an M.A. candidate in history at Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. He is researching maroon communities in the Dismal Swamp. “Creolization” of African, Native American, and European peoples does not warrant a simple definition. There were many different regions and subregions that saw different degrees of influence from the three continents. The Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina, home to a maroon colony of runaway slaves, had its own “swamp culture” that was unique to that of the surrounding areas while it also had varying degrees of outside influences. Early in European colonization, it was inhabited by people who were hiding from something as its impenetrability garnered its inhabitants a degree of secrecy. The majority of early inhabitants were Native Americans who were feeling the pressure of land encroachments and whites who sought to escape society. Whites and Native Americans established survival methods and formed groups often with members of both ethic equations. African Americans, as chattel slavery developed and increasing numbers of runaways took refuge in the swamp, joined these groups rather than establishing their own. Thus, the “swamp culture” was a conglomeration of the three with minimal African cultural continuity evident. A look at Virginia as a slave depot lends further support to this position. Primary accounts of slaves who experienced the swamp reveal the maroons to be Christianized and highly able to communicate with the outside world which they did to negotiate trade.