Why has concern about past injustices arisen recently? Calls for reparations did begin in the late 1960s, but did not pick up steam until two decades later. Academic articles about past injustices and reparations began with a very slow trickle in the 1970s and the 1980s (with most arguing against the idea). A few more academic works appeared in the 1990s, with the issue coming of age by the year 2000 in the academic literature, with a spate of articles and a smaller number of books published on the subject, along with a flood of government apologies. Many of these arguments maintain that (some) people today are responsible for the past, though there are important dissenters. I discuss the substance of these arguments in the next chapter, but here I want to ask two questions that are rarely posed, much less discussed. First, why in this historical moment has the issue of past injustice arisen? The idea of historical injustice never occurred to people in the nineteenth century (or earlier); so why has it arisen now as a concept? Second, of the countless past injustices, how does one pick which victims of past injustice deserve redress today?

The many arguments about historical injustice do not ask why there is now so much concern about the issue; nor can these many arguments help determine which past injustices should be of political concern and which should not. Why are Huguenots and Chinese Americans never or rarely mentioned as victims of historical injustice? Or Irish Americans? Or women or workers? The advocates of rectifying historical injustice argue that the shape of the history of injustice matters, and that governments have a responsibility to rectify injustices done in their name in the past. But this plea for more remembering is much too general and vague to be politically or theoretically useful.