How to Use peasantry in a Sentence
peasantry
noun-
Stalin’s purges took millions of lives among the peasantry in the 1930s.
—David E. Hoffman, Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2022
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The women peasantry of Europe have always worn their skirts short — as short as some of those worn on the streets of San Diego; and nobody has sought to discourage them.
—San Diego Union-Tribune, 21 Dec. 2021
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The Portuguese attacker's ego is far too enlarged to commit to the peasantry of tracking back anymore - so Karim fills in.
—SI.com, 10 Oct. 2017
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Less contempt for indigenous science (and for the Irish peasantry) might have saved millions.
—Raj Patel, New York Times, 14 Apr. 2017
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We meta-originalists hope that politicians, legal scholars, and the peasantry take these words to heart.
—Dennard Dayle, The New Yorker, 22 July 2022
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Despite huge increases in economic growth since the late 1950s, little had been done to improve the plight of the vast Mexican peasantry.
—Alexander F. Remington, Washington Post, 9 July 2022
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For decade upon decade, the message from Chicago's royal rulers to the peasantry has always been terribly simple and clear.
—John Kass, chicagotribune.com, 25 May 2017
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In Africa, the urban working classes turned out to be far more important to decolonization than the peasantry.
—Pankaj Mishra, The New Yorker, 29 Nov. 2021
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Among the peasantry of Russia sugar must be an unknown luxury, or at least its use by the people must be confined to Holy days and Festivals, for the consumption per head is but 2 pounds a year.
—Daniel C. Schlenoff, Scientific American, 26 June 2017
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The peasants who remained in the countryside were often able to take their pick of unused land, increasing the power of the landed peasantry and boosting the rural economy.
—National Geographic, 23 Apr. 2020
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Turgenev saw in them a crude but powerful materialism that counterposed the needs of the peasantry against the vague consolations of art.
—Keith Gessen, The New Yorker, 29 Aug. 2022
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Consequently, any temperance movement to promote the health and well-being of the peasantry was quickly snuffed out, lest the tsar’s revenues be diminished.
—Mark Lawrence Schrad, Time, 20 July 2021
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For anyone who knows the history, though, there is also an invisible story of the Ukrainian peasantry murdered by Stalin in the thirties.
—Jennifer Homans, The New Yorker, 17 Oct. 2022
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What occurred here is that there was a gradual shift in the peasantry to Islam, but by the mid-9th century there were no elite lineages which patronized Zoroastrianism.
—Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 24 June 2011
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Jan’s efforts are often helped by the local peasantry, whose rebelliousness has been stoked by years of excess taxation and other abuses.
—Dennis Harvey, Variety, 5 Sep. 2022
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But those childhood sicknesses would have had the benefit of triggering some future immunity in the peasantry.
—Marylynn Salmon, The Conversation, 13 July 2022
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By a visual code most Koreans know, Yeun’s pale skin and delicate features connote cosmopolitanism, while my dark, mushier features evoke the rural peasantry.
—New York Times, 3 Feb. 2021
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Virtually all the books, however, demonstrate Simenon’s lasting fondness for and understanding of the country peasantry and the urban working classes.
—Vince Passaro, Harper's magazine, 22 July 2019
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After his 2016 election, Moïse quickly lost all credibility because of a corruption scandal, with all sectors of the Haitian population – its small political elite class, the wealthy, the middle classes and the broad peasantry.
—Patrick D Bellegarde-Smith, The Conversation, 12 July 2021
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Critics say the purpose of Soviet leader Josef Stalin was not simply to rush industrial development, but also to destroy the traditional life and values of the Russian peasantry.
—Fred Weir, The Christian Science Monitor, 21 Aug. 2020
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Then-leader Mao Zedong had ordered educated youth from politically influential families to be sent to the countryside to learn from the peasantry.
—Washington Post, 19 May 2018
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Karl Marx famously argued that the enclosure of common agricultural lands for private grazing, shutting out and impoverishing the peasantry, created a supply of labor for industry in towns: the first proletariat.
—Heather Souvaine Horn, The New Republic, 16 Apr. 2018
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The philosophical difference between Maoism and Marxism–Leninism is that the peasantry are the revolutionary vanguard in pre-industrial societies rather than the proletariat.
—Matt B. Weir, Harper’s Magazine , 18 Jan. 2022
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That growth lifted 500 million people out of poverty and vaulted generations of Chinese from peasantry into relatively well-paying manufacturing or service jobs.
—Washington Post, 16 May 2017
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Codreanu’s fondness for peasant costume expressed Romanian fascism’s idealization of the peasantry.
—Kevin Passmore, Slate Magazine, 3 Apr. 2017
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Deprived of leadership, meeting places, offices, records, and sympathetic Socialist town councils, the landless peasantry became subject to the landowners’ conventional tactics of strike breaking and intimidation.
—Michael Ebner, Slate Magazine, 30 Jan. 2017
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All are essentially fables — alternately heartbreaking and farcical — set mainly among the downtrodden peasantry.
—J. Hoberman, New York Times, 7 Apr. 2016
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Marxism in its origins primarily focused on the industrial proletariat, but Mao’s model, unlike the one that guided Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries to victory, suggested that the peasantry could become the revolutionary social class.
—Julian Gewirtz, Harper's Magazine, 30 Mar. 2020
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'peasantry.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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