Hanna Krall is an acclaimed journalist and author, whose books were translated into multiple languages. However, relatively little critical attention has been given since her rise to world fame to her early work as a journalist. This article revisits this unjustly neglected part of her biography, when she made her name by reportages portraying the realities of life in Poland in the 1970s (the Edward Gierek's decade) and registering the tensions that led to the political earthquake of 1980 and culminated in the collapse of the communist system in 1989.

This article is the second instalment of a study of the Polish humourous and satirical magazines published in the United States in the late 19th century. While the earliest of them that started in the 1880s were ephemera with a lifespan of a few months, their successors from the 1890s (Bocian [The Stork], Djabeł [The Devil], Kropidło [The Sprinkler], Kuryer Świąteczny [The Holiday Courier] and Maczuga [The Cudgel]) managed to stay in the market for much longer. The article, based on archived source material, follows the fortunes of the earliest humour magazines published in Chicago and sketches the profiles of their publishers and editors. This piece of research into a largely forgotten section of the popular press, published abroad and in the home country, has produced a number of insights that could be of use not only within the field of press history.