 Due to the topical material and dialect songs, he wrote "studying this music gave me an opportunity early on to place past events in their historical context".In the contextual approach to history, developments should be compared across fields, and this is a feature of the school of Alexandre Koyre, I. Bernard Cohen, and Walter Pagel, the latter two being teachers of Debus.Debus studied chemical engineering and history, graduating with a major in chemistry in the summer of 1947 from Northwestern University.