To much of the nation, the South is a place apart, with manners and mores all its own. Yet not in 100 years has its role had such implications for the future of America as now. Last month more than 70 TIME correspondents, writers, reporter-researchers and editors set out to assess the South as it is today, to evaluate its present state--and its stimulating future. Working under the direction of Assistant Managing Editor Ray Cave, Washington News Editor Edward Jackson (a native of Mount Airy, N.C.) and James Bell, chief of the Atlanta bureau, they examined Southern politics, culture, business and society.

Not all of the staffers who worked on this week's special issue come from the eleven states of the old Confederacy, but many have ties to the region. Senior Writer Michael Demarest scouted through family recipes written in the spidery handwriting of New Orleans ancestors for his story on Southern cuisine. Associate Editor Spencer Davidson visited the Deep South for the first time since serving as Atlanta bureau chief in the 1960s--and returned North startled at the changes in Birmingham. Washington Correspondent Simmons Fentress, who did much of the political reporting, speaks with a pronounced North Carolina drawl, but a Mississippi lady told him, "I knew you weren't from the South." Washington Correspondent Arthur White toured the South for several weeks to report on the good life. One memorable locale: Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp.

An all-expense-paid Government vacation at Fort Jackson, S.C., during the Korean War, was one of Senior Writer Stefan Kanfer's recollections when he sat down to write our opening story and assessment of the Southern spirit. New York Correspondent Eileen Shields, while reporting on Southern agriculture, interviewed a farmer with 100 acres and a mule. Lost to the story was the mule--a venerable 25, it died the day after her visit.

For the Southerners on the staff, the assignment had a personal meaning. Some had left the South to work in New York or in bureaus around the world, but, says Washington Correspondent Bonnie Angelo, a North Carolinian: "Southerners never really leave. There's always a cranny of their psyche that cherishes the soft-edged South."

Paul Gray, who wrote the analysis of Southern fiction in Books, has admired William Faulkner "since I was young enough to have a hero." He remembers, from the days when he was an undergraduate at Ole Miss, watching the man he calls "the genius of the South" walking through Oxford, undisturbed by students or townspeople.

Nation Head Researcher Margaret Boeth, whose family has lived in Mississippi for seven generations, left the South for New York 19 years ago. "When I first arrived and people asked me where I was from, I'd say New York," she laughs. "It was ludicrous, in view of my accent. Now I proudly say I'm from Mississippi."

For Correspondent Jack White the past two years in the Atlanta bureau have been somewhat reassuring to him as a black. "The North is still battling things that have already been accomplished in the South," he says. "The South's my home, and I would like to raise my children there."

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