Natasha Trethewey's work as U.S. Poet Laureate consistently addressed historical erasure by insisting on the presence of Black history in Southern landscapes, treating the poem as an instrument of historical restoration against the forgetting that official culture performs; A poet might write about historical erasure in the specific context of the Freedmen's Bureau records, the vast archive of documentation about formerly enslaved people's lives that was largely destroyed or inaccessible for most of American history, exploring what it means to try to reconstruct lives from fragments; The destruction of the Black press archives, the deliberate burning of Black newspapers, libraries, and community records during racial violence, is a subject for historical erasure poetry that connects the physical violence of racial terror to the epistemic violence of destroying the evidence of Black achievement; A student poet might write about the experience of researching an ancestor and hitting the wall of historical erasure, the point where the archive goes silent because the people you are looking for were not considered worth documenting, exploring both the frustration and the creative challenge of writing beyond the archive's edge; A contemporary poet might write about historical erasure in relation to Confederate monuments, exploring the inverse process: the active construction of a false historical narrative through the monumental celebration of slavery's defenders while the stories of the enslaved are erased from public commemoration; The erasure of Black soldiers from Civil War memory, both the 180,000 Black Union soldiers whose service was systematically minimised and the Black Confederate camp servants conscripted into service who appear in neo-Confederate mythology, is a rich subject for historical erasure poetry