ABSTRACT
Sober academics must perforce don the coonskin cap, as improbable Clint Eastwoods of the lecture hall, venturing onto their own frontiers. Historians have salvaged elements from the Thesis, rearranged in novel forms. Some have broadened the definition of frontier. Some have repudiated the Thesis so strenuously as to become, by a kind of reactive acculturation or polarity, negative versions of Turner himself. William Cronon has an appealing version of Turnerianism. Turnerism thus becomes a call to study 'human beings working with changing tools to transform the resources' of an opened region 'and defining their notions of political and cultural community' within 'a context of shifting environmental and economic restraints'. In the same long tradition of a medieval frontier, the eminent Hispanist Julian Bishko conducted pioneering courses on comparative medieval frontiers; his article in 1963 on the 'Medieval Ranching Frontier' is still considered a classic.
