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Recent Examples of cottarIn 1846 and 1847, potatoes, the subsistence crop of the cottar subtenants who composed nearly half the population on some Hebridean estates, failed almost entirely.—Hugh Raffles, The New York Review of Books, 9 Oct. 2020
The Gospel authors, far from being community leaders preserving oral sayings for largely illiterate followers, were highly literate members of a small, erudite upper crust, distant in experience, attitude, and geography from any Galilean peasant preachers.
—
Adam Gopnik,
The New Yorker,
24 Mar. 2025
Set in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where Mateus was raised, a peasant community of grape-pickers become agents in an open-air ritual of remembrance and rebellion.
Not only does the peon and con man Tom end up refashioning himself as the rich and carefree Dickie, but Highsmith’s novel itself was a retelling of Henry James’s The Ambassadors.
—
Hillary Kelly,
The Atlantic,
19 Apr. 2024
Not afraid but brave, not weak but empowered, not peons but partners.
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