The Monroe Doctrine
Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America
by Jay Sexton
Hill and Wang, 304 pp., $27

The Monroe Doctrine was a parenthetical item inserted in President James Monroe’s 1823 message to Congress. Drafted by a committee that included Monroe, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, it declared opposition to colonial expansion in the Americas, and has proved the most enduring “doctrine” in two centuries of American statecraft.