Secondary sources synthesize primary and secondary material to construct an argument or advance a claim or promote an interpretation. In other words, they are materials about topics, and these topics can include events, ideas, people, or habits. The very act of producing scholarship produces secondary sources. Textbooks, journal articles, critiques and reviews, biographies, histories and documentary films are secondary sources. In these, the author has sifted through information, selecting some and rejecting some, and then assembled it to make a point. Secondary sources increase a student's breadth of knowledge about a topic because they generally bring together disparate information. They may also, in their interpretation of many other sources, prompt one to consider several sides of an issue or event and the various ways an author can interpret those events. 

Sometimes, what begins as a secondary source can become a primary source. If you are studying beliefs about race in the 1890s, a scientific textbook written in 1895 about race would have scientific information too outdated for today's scientists. Yet it might have information about how scientists in the 1890s understood race. Here, time transforms a secondary source into a primary source. 
 
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Examples of Secondary Sources 

Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose 

Back Of The Big House: The Architecture Of Plantation Slavery by John Vlach. 

Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture by Robert C. Allen. 

Los Tejanos: Sus Huellas en esta Tierra (The Texas Mexicans: Footprints on the Land), exhibit at Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum 

Jackie Robinson: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad 

Mechanic Accents : Dime Novels And Working-Class Culture In America by Michael Denning. 

John Wayne's America by Garry Wills.