Not much is spoken in our history books on the significance of miscegeny in maintaining slavery. Wherever men and women mix, sex often becomes an unspoken, undocumented, but overriding factor. Was there any doubt what the purpose of a light-skinned, young female slave would be on any plantation?
No one ever speaks of it, but I think sex is also a large part of what attracts men to radical Islam. Women have no rights. Men can marry four women at a time. A man can escape a rape charge simply by saying the sex was consensual.
The most recent thing I read was Setting the World Ablaze, which focused on Adams, Jefferson and Washington by John Ferling. Based on having previously read with some care the chief scholarly biographies of Washington (Douglas Southall Freedman) and Jefferson (Dumas Malone) as well as some of more recent scurulous stuff on Jefferson, my sense was that these modern writers (I hesitate to call them historians even though they hold academic chairs in history) have it in for Jefferson. Many conversatives, especially religious conservatives, dislike Jefferson for his Deism and for his egalitarianism (though his was an egalitarianism of opportunity, not the modern one of result), and even for his generally being a man of the Enlightenment. My own view is that the American Experiment is fully bound up in, and inseparable from, the English and Scottish (at least) Enlightentments and our 'conservative' values today are the values that were seen as liberal, even radical, in their day: individual liberty, economic liberty, and religious tolerance.