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 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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