(this post comes to you from Panama City, FL…the land that internet largely forgot–Happy Holiday)

I don’t fly home often.  Port Columbus Airport is an efficient airport, and while not a hub does generally get the job done for a reasonable price (even if one ignores Columbus’s shortlived center of operations for discount airline Skybus).  In fact, this is only the third time in 4.5 years I’ve flown from Columbus to Panama City, and the third time I’ve ever flown into Panama City (PFN) from anywhere in my entire life.
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Unemployment in the United States is at 6.7% (as of the November figures). What about in the Panhandle? What about in the South more generally? With the NY Times reported “States’ Funds for Jobless Are Drying Up” these questions have a more tangible important to our readers in the South.

Using Jeff’s map of the Panhandle as my starting point, I compiled the unemployment averages of all 29 counties in the Florida Panhandle from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The most recent numbers available for October are compared below to that month’s national average of 6.5%.

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A blog I’ve recently been amazed by is Strange Maps.  After perusing some of their recent posts, I came across two maps related to beverages and the South.  This theme of beverages also reminded me of an interesting map I saw on the CDC BRFSS maps.

The first Strange Map post of note is about a very Southern beverage: Sweet Tea.

The map above is from this site, where you can interactively play around with some research done on the prevalence of sweet tea at McDonald’s in Virginia.  I won’t spoil the punchline for you, but there is an interesting dividing line between places where sweet tea and non-sweet tea are served.

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The next notable map has to do with the terms that various parts of the country use to designate carbonated beverages.

For those of us from the South, you’re probably not shocked at the seemingly odd Southern trend for calling every carbonated beverage “Coke” no matter what brand the beverage may be (e.g. “Hey man, you want a coke?  We got Pepsi, Sprite, Dr. Pepper… any of these cokes sound good to you?”).  I was still a little bit surprised by the depth and breadth of this usage, even knowing the Southern trend to use the term “coke”.

Strange Maps reports an interesting take on this usage, by the way.  The use of “Coke” as a term for all carbonated beverages might be related to the fact that Coke started in Atlanta.  Hence the term spread out from Atlanta into the South, in much the same way that other brand names have been coopted to mean an entire category of products (e.g. BandAids, Xerox machine, Ziplock bag, Kleenex, to “Google” something, etc.).

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Here’s one more beverage related map, this time from the CDC.

Now, looking at this map maybe you won’t be shocked by the lack of alcohol consumption in the South.  But I certainly was.  Southerners invented most of this country’s indigenous liquors (whisky, bourbon, etc.) as well as many of its great cocktails (hurricanes, mint juleps, etc).  Furthermore, isn’t beer drinking a pretty Southern stereotype?  Anyway, it appears that the South’s relationship to alcohol is more schizophrenic than I knew.  Despite its great alcoholic heritage, its religious and politically conservative mores seem to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed in the region.  Probably has something to do with the number of dry counties as well.

Inspired by the previous post pulled from Strange Map; I thought it would be a good idea to give a tour of the Panhandle by its demographics (you can tell I’ve strayed too far from numbers in the last few posts – I’m jonesing for some statistical empiricism).

First, to quickly return to the subject of our first posts, let me sort out what I’m talking about when I say “the Panhandle” (abbrev. PH, from now on). The PH arguably includes the following counties:

Taking this area as my best guess at the geography of the Panhandle, the following things are most definitive of this region (some the following maps are taken from 2000 Census Data, which is unfortunately the best data on these subjects at the moment).

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The guys over at the blog Strange Maps have come up with a great display demonstrating a modern effect of slavery on the contemporary US.  Check out these two maps, one detailing 2008 voting patterns, and the other detailing 1860 cotton production (bluer areas represent voting Democrat, redder areas Republican):

And now a juxtaposition of the two:

The maps kind of speak for themselves, but what is most interesting is the extent of the geographic correlation.  Furthermore, turning to the Panhandle, one can see suggestive evidence for why the Tallahassee area tends to vote more Democratic.

In this post, I am going to earn my keep as the in-house historian and look at how history has shaped the region.  Jeff has already talked extensively about the social aspects of what the Panhandle is, and I’m sure Brian will follow suit.

After the Seven Years War ended in 1763, Britain took over the Florida territory from Spain and split it into two parts.  One of these was West Florida, an expanse of land that reached from the Chattahoochee River to the Mississippi River (except for the port of New Orleans), going all the way north to a straight line that included roughly the bottom third of the current states of Alabama and Mississippi.

After the Revolutionary War, Spain returned to power in Florida, as allies of the colonists against the British, but Americans balked at this northern expansion in Western Florida.  In 1795, the treaty of San Lorenzo returned the West Florida border to the northern position recognizable today at the 31st parallel.  Americans and British poured into the area, and in 1810, British settlers established the short lived independent Republic of West Florida, which included everything between the Perdido and Mississippi Rivers, and south of that 31st parallel—which for those of you keeping track, doesn’t include any of current day Florida.

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The geographic boundary of the panhandle has been debated by this blog’s authors since the three of us were in college.   To be honest, these conversations have been one part intellectual curiosity and one part simple bulls*$%ing.  Still, for a blog supposedly written by three people from the panhandle, it deserves asking: where is this place?

For those who’ve never heard of the Florida panhandle, the simple answer is that it’s the part of Florida that looks like the “handle of a pan.”  In colloquial use, the “Florida panhandle” refers to that strip of land in North Florida, running roughly East-West, which borders Alabama and Georgia.  The region is generally contrasted with the “peninsula” of Florida, running roughly North-South, which juts into the Atlantic Ocean.  This definition seems simple enough – but as you will soon learn, no answer is too simple for me, Lawrence, and Brian to make it complicated.

Why isn’t this definition enough?  Well, in 1983 a man named Benedict Anderson wrote a book called “Imagined Communities.”  In this book he argued that any community is “imagined” by those who see themselves as part of this community.  What Anderson meant by this “imagination” stuff, is that communities (or regions like the panhandle) are not simply geographic places defined by rivers or national borders.  Instead, Anderson argued, a place is always first and foremost defined by those who live in an area and believe they share something in common.

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