In this article, I offer a reading of the psychoanalytic concept of identification, with specific attention to its meaning in the context of children's historical learning. In educational contexts, it is not identification but historical empathy that teachers and researchers typically regard as holding pedagogical status. Using examples from my visit to "Historica's" 2004 Heritage Fair, I argue that identification is important for the way it marks the young subject's ambivalent entry into a world of historical relations. A study of identification cannot advance historical consciousness, but it does highlight the senses of vulnerability and emotional conflict in trying to orient the self to a very old world and the losses this implies. (Contains 2 notes.)