The purpose of this study is to explore how historical content is influenced by inquiry design aimed at developing students’ critical thinking skills and being relevant to students. As a background, educators have suggested that inquiry-based learning can be one approach to developing students' critical historical thinking skills. At the same time, a single focus on developing students' disciplinary thinking has been criticized for neglecting the existential dimension of history education. One inquiry model that aims to combine the relevance of the historical topic to students and the qualification of students' historical thinking is the American Inquiry Design Model, IDM (Swan et al. 2018). At the center of the IDM framework is an overarching question that frames the inquiry, referred to as a compelling question. The function of a compelling question is to be relevant in relation to both the subject matter and the students. Little is known about how these two qualitative dimensions are aligned in teachers’ inquiry designs (cf. Conrad et al. 2024). The empirical data consists of 14 inquiry designs  by secondary school teachers in Sweden. The inquiries were structured according to the IDM framework and communicated through a so-called blueprint, i.e. an organizational scheme for teaching the inquiry. The blueprints were analyzed qualitatively using a historical didactical framework referred to as the contact zone model (Johansson2023). The model distinguishes between two levels, an event level and a discursive level, as well as between the aspects of time and space. Preliminary results from the contact zone analysis will be presented, and the results are intended to provide teachers and teacher educators with guidance in selecting content in designing inquiries in history education.