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The longest presidential inaugural address in history was delivered in 1841 by William Henry Harrison. It lasted an hour and forty-five minutes.

Since then incoming presidents have opted for relative brevity, rhetorical height favoured over lexical length. Perhaps that has something to do with President Harrison's costly long moment of self-indulgence. Delivering the speech in bitter cold, he caught pneumonia and died a month later. The longest speech, the shortest presidency. There's a lesson there.

Most presidential inaugurations are memorable for the right reason: the opportunity they present to signal, in pomp and oratory, the succeeding milestones of historical change for the nation.

The inauguration has become the quintessential national American event. Though it celebrates an intensely political occasion — there was a winner and a loser in the presidential election, after all — it reaches above party politics. It is part of what Walter Bagehot, the Victorian political commentator, would have called the dignified more than the efficient part of the constitution. It's the coronation, the state opening of parliament and a royal wedding all rolled into one.

A lot of Republicans have headed out of town for this week's festivities, but many more remain, happy to play their part in history.

The incidentals of inaugurations change with the character of the President. To emphasise his Everyman credentials, Jimmy Carter got out of his limousine to walk part of the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. Andrew Jackson opened the White House to all kinds of people on his first night, leading to outcry. According to one of his biographers, John F. Kennedy slept with two women other than his wife on the night of his inauguration.

But the highlight, the most enduring feature of the day, is always the inaugural address. Even the least verbally gifted of presidents manage to soar to something a little bit lyrical on this, their biggest day.

Calvin Coolidge — “Silent Cal” — orated on the virtues of international law and justice: “Peace will come when there is realisation that only under a reign of law, can there be any hope of a complete and satisfying life. Parchment will fail, the sword will fail, it is only the spiritual nature of man that can be triumphant.”

George Bush — as memorably tongue-tied as his son, spoke of “history as a book with many pages, and each day we fill a page with acts of hopefulness and meaning. The new breeze blows, a page turns, the story unfolds. And so today a chapter begins”.

It's probably no accident that the most memorable speeches have come at some of the most memorable moments in American history: Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, delivered one month before he was assassinated in the dying days of the Civil War, was one of the shortest. Like Gettysburg it was an example of political immortality through verbal economy. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace.”

Franklin Roosevelt's first inaugural address is remembered mostly for his diagnosis of the nation's psychological crisis in the midst of the Great Depression — “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror”. But it was remarkable also as a rhetorical assault on the “moneychangers” and speculators” who had got the country into its mess.

President Kennedy delivered perhaps the most remembered inaugural lines of all, when American confidence was at a low ebb in the Cold War: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

In 2009 America faces economic and political challenges comparable with some of those moments in its history. It will have a President today renowned for an unusual facility with words.

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