How to Actually Use the Jamaican Historical Society Bulletin
If you are researching Jamaican history, the bulletin is one of those sources everyone cites but nobody seems to have easy access to. It is a quarterly publication from the Jamaican Historical Society, founded in 1953, and it contains peer-reviewed articles, short notes, research findings, and occasional obituaries of notable figures in the field. The journal covers everything from colonial administration records to oral history projects, and it is indexed in some Caribbean academic databases but not consistently. Here is what most people get wrong about using it. They assume every article from the bulletin will be available digitally. That assumption breaks down fast. A lot of the older issues, particularly before 1990, exist only in physical libraries. I spent three weeks trying to track down a specific 1978 article on Maroon land disputes through a digital repository network. It was not digitized. What I ended up doing was mailing a request to the Jamaica National Trust Commission library in Kingston with my institutional affiliation and the exact citation. They scanned and emailed it within ten days. That workaround works for anyone with a legitimate research need, even without a university affiliation, but you have to be patient with the postal route. The bulletin uses a standard Chicago style format for citations, which sounds straightforward until you realize the pagination is inconsistent across volumes. Some issues have continuous pagination through the entire year. Others reset per article. When I was cross-referencing two bulletin pieces with the same author and similar titles, I nearly published a wrong citation because I assumed the pagination was continuous. It was not. Always check the table of contents page for each individual volume to see how numbering works before you reference it.
There is also a subscription component that trips people up. You can subscribe directly through the Jamaican Historical Society, but individual issues are sometimes listed on academic vendor sites at inflated prices. A single back issue from 1985 showed up on one platform for forty dollars. That is not realistic. Buying the annual subscription through the society is cheaper if you need more than two issues, and it often includes access to their proceedings as well. The real value of the bulletin comes from the research notes section, which is where shorter findings and newly discovered document fragments appear. These are not found in any other publication. I found a transcribed list of freedman registrations from the 1830s in a 1992 bulletin issue that I later used to corroborate a genealogical record I had been stuck on for months. That kind of material does not get widely publicized and it is not always easy to find even inside the bulletin itself unless you know where to look. One limitation worth being honest about: the bulletin does not cover recent decades with the same depth. Issues from the late 1990s onward tend to have fewer original archival discoveries and more general interest pieces. If your research focus is post-emancipation economic history or contemporary social movements, you are better off pairing bulletin references with works from the University of the West Indies Press or the Institute of Jamaica publications. The bulletin remains essential for pre-twentieth century topics, especially anything involving plantation records, missionary documentation, or early Jamaican political organization.
To access current issues, the simplest path is subscribing through the Jamaican Historical Society website or contacting their secretary directly. For back issues, check with the Gleanch Company archives, the UWI Mona library, and the Jamaica National Heritage Trust. Interlibrary loan through larger North American universities with Caribbean studies collections can also pull physical copies when local options run dry.
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