This symposium celebrated the 25th year of experimental work at the Bates Laboratory using electrons to investigate the properties of nucleons and nuclei. Experimentalists and theorists from other sister laboratories together with local representatives from Bates and MIT spoke both about the past highlights of their field and about the current trends both at Bates and elsewhere. The symposium began with talks on nuclear structure studies with electrons, it went on to discuss the structure of few-body nuclei and the hadronic constituents of those nuclei, and concluded with a review of the status of parity-violating electron scattering with reports on the recently completed measurements at Bates and at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility.