In my sophomore year, I started to volunteer at UC San Diego’s Thornton Hospital. One of my duties was to discharge patients who had recovered from their illness. One day, I had a patient, named Charles, who I later learned was Native American. The two of us soon struck up a conversation. One interesting point Charles brought up was that, besides providing the rest of the world with corn, tomatoes, and potatoes, the New World was also the origin of 95% of domesticated cotton grown in the world today. Charles also told me that Native Americans invented a primitive form of fertilization, where one would bury a nutrient-rich fish with ears of corn. The history classes I took at school only covered the last 500 years of history, focusing on modern
