front cover of Hemispheric Imaginings
Hemispheric Imaginings
The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire
Gretchen Murphy
Duke University Press, 2005
In 1823, President James Monroe announced that the Western Hemisphere was closed to any future European colonization and that the United States would protect the Americas as a space destined for democracy. Over the next century, these ideas—which came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine—provided the framework through which Americans understood and articulated their military and diplomatic role in the world. Hemispheric Imaginings demonstrates that North Americans conceived and developed the Monroe Doctrine in relation to transatlantic literary narratives. Gretchen Murphy argues that fiction and journalism were crucial to popularizing and making sense of the Doctrine’s contradictions, including the fact that it both drove and concealed U.S. imperialism. Presenting fiction and popular journalism as key arenas in which such inconsistencies were challenged or obscured, Murphy highlights the major role writers played in shaping conceptions of the U.S. empire.

Murphy juxtaposes close readings of novels with analyses of nonfiction texts. From uncovering the literary inspirations for the Monroe Doctrine itself to tracing visions of hemispheric unity and transatlantic separation in novels by Lydia Maria Child, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Lew Wallace, and Richard Harding Davis, she reveals the Doctrine’s forgotten cultural history. In making a vital contribution to the effort to move American Studies beyond its limited focus on the United States, Murphy questions recent proposals to reframe the discipline in hemispheric terms. She warns that to do so risks replicating the Monroe Doctrine’s proprietary claim to isolate the Americas from the rest of the world.

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The Making of the Monroe Doctrine
Ernest R. May
Harvard University Press, 1975
In an extraordinary display of the historical imagination at work, Ernest May has reinterpreted the genesis of the Monroe Doctrine and written an exceptional study of the relationship of policymakers to political structure. The author shows how domestic politics, more especially the upcoming 1824 presidential election, dictated the content and meaning of the Monroe Doctrine. May accomplishes his task by systematically examining the ideological perceptions of American policymakers and the foreign policies of Great Britain, France, and Russia. He concludes that the policymakers had wide freedom of choice. He then makes a searching study of United States internal politics and finds that there were no interest group pressures influencing decision-makers—it was an era of non-issues. Effectively eliminating the usual forces that shape foreign policy, the author develops a subtle and sophisticated case for the controlling power of presidential politics. May builds a case of relentless logic, giving us a historical reconstruction that is as fascinating in its unfolding as it is convincing in its assumptions and conclusions.
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