The first use of the yet unnamed doctrine was in 1836, when Americans objected to Britain's alliance with Texas on the principle of the Monroe Doctrine.
On December 2, 1845, US President James Polk announced to Congress that the principle of the Monroe Doctrine should be strictly enforced and that the United States should aggressively expand into the West (see Manifest Destiny).
In 1852 some politicians used the principle of the Monroe Doctrine to argue for forcefully removing the Spanish out of Cuba.
Between 1864 and 1867, Napoleon III set up a puppet regime in Mexico, and Americans proclaimed this as a violation of "The Doctrine" (See Maximilian Affair). This was the first time the Monroe Doctrine was widely referred to as a "Doctrine".
In the 1870s, President Ulysses S. Grant extended the Monroe Doctrine, saying that the U.S. will not tolerate a colony being transferred from one European country to another.
In 1895, the Olney interpretation (also known as Olney Declaration) was United States Secretary of State Richard Olney's interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine when a border dispute occurred between British Guiana and Venezuela. Olney claimed that the Monroe Doctrine gave the United States authority to mediate border disputes in the Western Hemisphere. Olney extended the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, which had previously stated merely that the Western Hemisphere was closed to European colonization.
The Drago Doctrine was announced in 1902 by the Foreign Minister of Argentina. Extending the Monroe Doctrine, it set forth the policy that no European power could use force against an American nation to collect debt.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which asserted the right of the U.S. to intervene in Latin America. This is the largest extension that has ever been added to the Monroe Doctrine.
In 1930 the Clark Memorandum was released, concluding that the Doctrine did not give the United States any right to intervene in Latin American affairs when the region was not threatened by Old World powers, thereby reversing the Roosevelt Corollary.
- Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1823-1826 (1927)
- Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (1949)
- Ernest R. May, The Making of the Monroe Doctrine (1975).
- Joel S. Poetker The Monroe Doctrine Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill Books, Inc, (1967).
- Donald Dozer The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance New York: Knopf (1965).