Developing disciplinary literacy in history requires that classrooms become an environment where students can engage in discursive practices typical of the profession. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized ways of reading and writing used in history to construct historical arguments and ways of reasoning. Learning history includes using language in particular ways to make meanings that are valued by the profession. Doing history involves close reading and evaluation of texts, making connections across texts, and constructing meanings by juxtaposing a series of texts to construct arguments. This article describes an approach to disciplinary literacy that can help teachers and students read the primary sources used in history lessons. The basic idea is to engage in reading practices typical of historians and to use some linguistic tools to help students understand how language constructs historical meanings. Through the analysis of linguistic choices that authors made (consciously or unconsciously) when producing the document, teachers and students engage in conversations about how language constructs historical meanings and perspectives. Conversations around the meaning of texts make visible the ways in which expert readers make meaning by integrating information from the text with their knowledge of the topic. This approach to disciplinary literacy also provides students with access to a rigorous curriculum in a scaffolded manner, allowing them to look critically at texts and think about historical issues. By thinking about texts as the products of meaning making choices, teachers can explore the choices that were not made or that could have been made and therefore better understand the implications of the particular ways in which a document frames an issue.