Seventh-grade students engaged in a guided historical inquiry about slavery, freedom, and unfreedom. The teacher carefully intertwined historical content, close reading, critical thinking, and text-based writing -- both extemporaneous and refined-- during Social Studies. Students scrutinized primary sources to build their historical schemas over the course of a week. They then engaged in the writing process during a week-long assessment. Students formulated emerging historical understandings through extemporaneous text-based writing, which were later used to draft, revise, and resubmit evidentiary and narrative essays. Findings revealed disparate degrees of criticality, complexity, and clarity between narrative and evidentiary essays. Teachers and researchers can gain rich, nuanced understandings from close examinations of students' reading, thinking, and revised writing.