What is a Secondary Source?
Secondary sources are books, periodicals, web sites, etc. that people write using the information from primary sources. They are not written by eyewitnesses to events, for instance, but use eyewitness accounts, photographs, diaries and other primary sources to reconstruct events or to support a writer's thesis about the events and their meaning. Many books you find in the Cornell Library Catalog are secondary sources.
However, some publishers reformat primary-source documents and publish them in book format; for example, see The American Revolution: A History in Documents.
