Arno J. Mayer, a historian whose unorthodox reading of the first half of the 20th century challenged conventional understanding of WWI, WWII and the Holocaust, died on Dec. 17 at a senior care facility in Princeton, NJ. He was 97.

Dr. Mayer was the son of Luxembourg Jews who fled to America with his family just ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940. His career in academia and writings was devoted largely to trying to make sense of the cataclysm the world had experienced. His early scholarship focused on the origins of WWI, while his later writing reached forward to the Holocaust and the founding of Israel.

A common idea threaded through his long career, which included seven books and teaching positions at Brandeis, Harvard and Princeton: that society must be conceived as a whole, and that history is the result of tensions among its constituent parts, like class and social structures.  He argued that WWI, WWII, and the Holocaust were the result of modern capitalism colliding with an entrenched European elite. While several prominent historians supported Dr. Mayer’s thesis, many others denounced it.