History does not stop at national borders. People, ideas, and cultural works move between societies, carrying their histories with them, sometimes acquiring new meanings along the way.
Across Our Gates is a personal project exploring history from an international perspective. Its central idea is simple: to better understand what happened within a society, we sometimes need to examine what happened beyond its borders, and then look back with a different perspective.
The word “our” does not refer to a particular country or community. Its meaning changes with each new piece of research. The gates may represent national borders, cultural boundaries, political divisions, or even the point where empirical knowledge meets philosophy.
The name was inspired by Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 film Within Our Gates. I discovered Micheaux’s work after watching D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. I was shocked by its racist content and began looking for criticism and responses to it. I learned that many of Micheaux’s early films faced censorship and were lost in the United States. This led me to become interested in their circulation and survival through export to Europe. Could evidence preserved abroad help us better understand a history that had been largely lost at home?
This question became the starting point for Across Our Gates.
The project is also concerned with the limits of historiography: what we can reconstruct through surviving evidence, what remains uncertain, and what may never be fully understood.
For now, this site is a place for research, reflection, and occasional writing. Its first investigation focuses on Oscar Micheaux’s films and their transatlantic histories.
