State and national educational initiatives have increased expectations for students' historical thinking and civic involvement. Guidance for relevant, purposeful classroom experiences with age appropriate, rigorous content has never been clearer, yet teachers still feel unprepared. Towards these ends, the authors direct attention to the antecedent of discovery: confusion. Confusion sparks the motivation to explore and solve mysteries. Manageable, engaging mysteries provide students the space and incentive to explore for answers they know are discoverable. Teachers can position students to identify the enigma as they scrutinize the documents; educators should recognize, and ease, students' emergent frustration with clues. Intentional curricular planning positions students to consider a mystery's many possible explanations, instead of simply searching for the right answer. Students, in doing so, can progress through all critical thinking tiers using every heuristic within historical thinking. To model this approach for this article, the authors selected a frequently taught, but often misunderstood era in American history, the Civil Rights Movement.