In this article I explore an often overlooked feature of everyday life that can serve as a powerful heuristic for students to engage history and geography critically: everyday place-names. Drawing on scholarship in critical toponymy, I explore how the city-text--the past as it is overlaid on top of the geography of the community through place-names--serves to commemorate particular histories that are often simultaneously exclusionary and taken-for-granted. Outlining three of the city-text's primary features--its unconventional narrative structure that emphasizes a worldview, its existence as a manifestation of state control over commemoration in the community, and its exclusive focus on heroism--I suggest that social studies classrooms be sites from which students critically engage the everyday city-texts of their own communities as a way of fostering critical thinking skills and commitments to historical and geographic critique.