Acceleration and Storage of Polarized Electron Beams

This article provides an update on my review at SPIN96 [1] on activities surrounding spin polarization in electron storage rings and accelerators. In the written versions of previous talks at the Spin Symposia I have opened with a review of the basic theory of radiative spin polarization, spin precession and resonance phenomena. That background material is readily available in the proceedings of earlier Symposia and elsewhere [1, 2, 3, 4]. So to avoid repetition I will, on this occasion, launch straight into the main themes. Historical overviews of radiative polarization can be found in [1, 5].