In this essay, the author offers a reading of both Sigmund Freud's and Madelaine's Acropolis encounters to propose an "affective conflict" at play in historical relations more generally. On the one side of the conflict, the author explores at some length Freud's (1939) theory of history as "archaic inheritance," which takes the form of psychical conflict and unconscious guilt. On the other side, she draws from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, which posits history as that which disrupts this very inheritance, or psychical "presence," as it were. Within the context of her inquiry, the most important difference between Freud and Levinas is that Freud points to the ruins of an internal history, or unconscious memory, and Levinas does not. What is striking about both Freud and Levinas--and the conflict she proposes through them--is that they point to an affective domain of history that pre-dates learning it. More recently, the notion of history's affective domain has surfaced in Paul Ricoeur's (2004) massive study, History, Memory, Forgetting. In this text, Ricoeur describes a "shadowy underside" of history that emerges "in the manner of an affection," and whose unexpected return eludes any conscious or "active search" for past knowledge. The authors' turn to Freud and Levinas brings to light some of this "shadowy underside" and further explores some implications for conceptions of teaching and learning history. The author outlines how historical learning is understood in current educational research. (Contains 8 notes.)