This interdisciplinary study brings history and art together in a definitive discussion of the Chinese woodblock print form of nianhua (literally "New Year pictures") and an extraordinary account of the cultural life of rural North China during the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries.

Beginning with an overview of nianhua production, James Flath considers the relationship of the prints to the social, cultural, and political milieu of North China from the late-Qing dyansty to the early 1950s. Using nianhua as historical documents, he reconstructs popular conceptions of domesticity, morality, gender, society, and modernity. Finally, he examines how communist authorities transformed the nianhua genre for use as a propaganda tool in the 1940s and early 1950s.