The degree also prepared him for the historical role he later played.

He could speak to academics in their own language.

He understood how institutions evaluated evidence.

He knew how to write for readers who expected footnotes and frameworks.

At the same time, he remained grounded in oral knowledge that no university course could reproduce.

That combination made his scholarship difficult to dismiss.

When he challenged simplistic accounts, he did so with authority recognized on both sides of the cultural line he often described.

His later honorary doctorates acknowledged a career that had exceeded the degree he earned before the war.

In a sense, his whole life became the dissertation he never completed.

He studied cultural change not from a distance but across a century.