Parity violation and hadron structure

Parity violation has played an important role in electron scattering since the 1970's when the first experiments were performed at SLAC. Since the late 1980's the focus of experiments has shifted from probing the neutral weak interaction itself to using the exchange of a Z-boson to access new information about the structure of hadrons. A brief survey of experiments that investigate this physics is presented, with a focus on the recently completed SAMPLE experiment at the MIT-Bates Laboratory