On July 19 Tennessee became the first state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution despite the opposition of President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean himself, to the legislation. “We have fought the battle and won it,” Gov. William Gannaway Brownlow telegraphed the U.S. Senate.

The Fourteenth Amendment proposed that state legislatures be held to the same constitutional standards as the federal government, and thus it formally settled the question the war had answered: whether the United States was a single nation or a collection of states, each with its own laws. Persons born or naturalized in the United States (including former slaves) would be recognized as citizens of the United States and the states in which they lived, and all males of twenty-one years or more would be allowed to vote, with the exception of Indians who were not taxed.

President Johnson’s main objection to the amendment was over Section 3, in which persons who had held elective state or federal office and later embraced the rebellion were barred from office in the postwar South. One estimate claimed that this eliminated at least eighteen thousand Southerners from politics. Johnson questioned Congress’s right to determine who would be eligible to be a state’s representative in Washington.

After assembling a successful quorum in favor of the amendment, Governor Brownlow cabled the U.S. Senate: “We have ratified the constitutional amendment in the [Tennessee] House, 43 voting for it, eleven against it, two of Andrew Johnson’s tools not voting. Give my respects to the dead dog of the White House!” Minutes after the governor’s message arrived, a joint resolution was put before the Senate restoring Tennessee to the Union. When other state legislatures resisted ratifying the amendment, Congress explicitly made ratification a condition for reentry. The amendment became the law of the land in July 1868.

On July 30, after procrastinating for nearly two years, Thomas Alva Edison applied for patents on his kinetograph and kinetoscope. He declined to pay an additional $150 to secure an international copyright for what was in fact motion-picture technology, declaring it was “not worth it.”

By the time he had begun to think seriously about motion photography, Edison already owned important patents for his refinements of the telegraph and the incandescent lamp, as well as for inventing the carbon telephone transmitter. His first motion-picture efforts, with an assistant, William Dickson, approached motion photography by rotating thick celluloid sheets around a large cylinder. This was already an improvement over photography’s traditional glass plates, but the device could record only five seconds’ worth of action at a time. Edison and Dickson concluded in the spring of 1889 that strips of film fed horizontally through a camera could allow an unlimited recording surface. That August George Eastman, of Rochester, New York, produced the first film that seemed flexible and durable enough. Edison sent Dickson to New York to buy a fifty-foot length for $2.50. “We’ve got it!” he shouted on seeing the new film. “Now work like hell!”

Edison and Dickson next punched holes along one side of the film length and developed sprockets to advance it past the shutter. The team’s second motion-picture camera was the size of an upright piano and used thirty-five-millimeter film, which has remained the standard width for one hundred years. Edison actually started out with a talkie; motion pictures and the phonograph were combined in his original kinetoscope, a peep show with synchronized music that he exhibited at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair.

At the time of her death on July 3 in New York City, Henrietta (“Hetty”) Green’s $100 million estate made her the richest woman in America. She had inherited a million dollars each from her father and aunt in 1865, and from then until her death at eightyone, she was known as a shrewd, if obsessive, manager of money. News writers reported—and contrived—stories of her miserliness, dubbing her the Witch of Wall Street. When, during a buying panic in January 1883, she demanded the return of $25 million in securities and $475,000 in cash from J. J. Cisco & Co., the firm went bankrupt, and a series of brokerage failures followed. She was a master lender of money, but even as she was lending $4.5 million to the city of New York, stories were circulating of her failing to pay her streetcar fare, of her moving from one boardinghouse to another in order to avoid tax assessors, and, most famously, of her refusal to pay a doctor to care for her son Ned when he injured his leg in a sledding accident. Her parsimony led to the leg’s amputation.

During her forty years as a market force, Hetty Green survived many Wall Street panics and also instigated a few bullish surges. She spent her last years living with her daughter in a Hoboken, New Jersey, apartment, from which she made frequent trips to the Chemical National Bank in New York City to tally her worth. She was briefly unseated as America’s wealthiest woman when the banker Russell Sage left his wife $70 million in 1906, but that lasted only until Margaret Olivia Sage gave most of her fortune to a charitable foundation she established in her late husband’s name.

By the time she reached old age, Hetty Green was understandably wary of reporters—“They picture me heartless,” she explained—but she couldn’t resist offering her opinions now and again. When she took out a permit for a revolver, she said she needed it “mostly to protect myself against lawyers. I’m not much afraid of burglars or highwaymen.”

Only weeks before he climbed the University of Texas tower on August 1 and took aim at dozens of his fellow students, Charles J. Whitman had confessed to a university psychiatrist that he thought of “going up on the tower with a deer rifle and … shooting people.” Whitman first killed his wife and mother, then loaded a trunk with ammunition, a knife, two water canisters, several high-powered rifles, and a shotgun bought on credit that day at Sears. He hauled the trunk to the top of the twenty-seven-story tower, got in place, and began firing from an observation ledge just before the tower clock tolled noon. His first victims had to lie for almost an hour in the heat before an armored car could be found to retrieve them. Whitman fired at points all over the campus, hitting a man on a bicycle, another watching from the bookstore, and wounding a policeman in the shoulder. Police fired at the tower from the ground and from an airplane circling above, but without visible result. Such a mass shooting by one gunman was unprecedented in America; after eighty minutes, twelve lay dead and thirty-one wounded.

Patrolman Romero Martinez was off duty cooking a steak when news of the shooting came over the radio. Martinez went immediately to the tower and with three other officers made his way up to the observation ledge. He took Whitman by surprise and killed him after an exchange of fire.

Charles Whitman, it turned out, had been a Marine, an altar boy, and an Eagle Scout and had had a lifelong fascination with guns. He expressed the hope in an explanatory note that his mother was in heaven, but he claimed to have hated his father “with a mortal passion.”