[2] Reinhold went to City College where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1929,[3] and then attended Columbia University, where, as a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, he earned a Ph.D. in Ancient History in 1933 with a dissertation, supervised by Charles Knapp on Marcus Agrippa.
[1][3] His teacher William Linn Westermann ranked him among the 3 best students he had ever trained, the other two being Moses Finkelstein and Naphtali Lewis, all three of whom took together a spring course on the Zenon papyri under Westerman in 1932.
[1] Following his attendance at Columbia, he spent two years at the American Academy in Rome as a fellow, during which time he travelled widely in Italy and Greece.
[3] In 1946, he published a critique of Michael Rostovtzeff's influential The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926), not in a scholarly venue, but in Bernhard Stern's Marxist journal Science & Society.
Meyer argued that the retroactive imposition of concepts use to analyse the forms of modern industrial economies, with their wage labour and complex financial webs onto classical societies was flawed from the start.
[6] At his scholarly prime (46), and one of the foremost young American historians of the history of Rome,[7] he was forced to resign in what was to become the first of 4 'retirements' in 1955,[1] a victim of the McCarthy era after declaring he would not reply to questions about his political views and colleagues.