Part A:: Discussion: Historical Lenses, Part B:: respond to your peers, compare and contrast the lens they identified

Can you help me understand this History question?

Part A:::
In this discussion, you will consider how historical lenses can affect the study of a historical topic. Select one of the secondary source articles from your research. After reading that article, write a discussion post about which of the following lenses you believe the article is using: social, political, economic, or other. Use at least two quotes from your source to justify your choice of lens. Your post title should also indicate which topic you have selected.

I have attached document for my topic and sources I used.

Part B:::
When responding to two post below, compare and contrast the lens they identified with the lens you identified for your source. If you identified the same lens, how does the evidence you each found to justify that choice compare with each other? If you selected different lenses, discuss how your historical topic might look through the lens they identified

Post 1: After reading Stewart’s Amandla! The Sullivan Principles and the battle to end apartheid in South Africa, I believe he is using an economic lens. “The original Sullivan Principles…became a focal point of debate about U.S. foreign policy and the behavior of multinational corporations… in South Africa”. Stewart talks about Sullivan trying to make the multinational companies that are based in South Africa give equal employment opportunities to “Blacks” as they did for “Whites”, which made me think it was a social lens at first because Sullivan’s main goal is to help the people of South Africa end apartheid. However, Stewart focuses more on the businesses and how they “experienced rapid price appreciation, but had low profit margins” when they used Sullivan’s Principles, which led me to conclusion of economic lens. Sullivan not only wanted to get the companies based in South Africa to employ more Blacks and give them equal opportunities in all aspects of the jobs available at the companies, he also wanted banks in America to stop funding South African government that didn’t support his cause, the “Sullivan Principles” he was trying to implement. “Leon Sullivan began to harden his position on apartheid in South Africa as early as October 1979 when he initiated a campaign to halt loans by U.S. banks to the South African government”.

Post 2: The author is arguing that there are many contributions made to the imagery of South Africa. One important contribution the author discusses is connectedness and belonging. South Africa was riddled with racism and exclusion of others based on their skin color. The author then goes on to detail how Mandela’s imagination and hard work helped to shape the new South Africa. The author also talks about how the prison experience influenced Mandela’s way of thinking. “While Mandela’s pre-Robben Island experiences were as important as the time he spent on the island in shaping his thinking, I suggest that the island gave him a concentrated opportunity to think through the contradictions of South Africa. He came to a management of these contradictions with difficulty. He struggled with the question of modernity and its racial insistence and the demands of tradition and ‘cosmopolitanness’ in facing questions of the past, present and future” (Soudien, 2015). I feel as though the author is using a social lens because he is analyzing the way Mandela viewed the world and the “new South Africa.” He is also using Mandela’s past experiences to effectively understand his thought process and how he understood the world.