[1] Goodwyn was best known for writing Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America, a book which chronicles the origins and rise of the People's Party, in the social and historical context from which it emerged, American Midwestern and Southwestern populism.

[3] An abridged version of Democratic Promise, titled The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, was published in 1978.

The Populist Moment became a staple in university history seminars, labor organizing institutes and community activism efforts for years to come.

[7] He continued documenting the movement in Montgomery, Alabama, and met James Bevel, a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

[6] According to the New York Times, the program "employed many black graduate students, in part because Dr. Goodwyn insisted that whites should not have sole possession of Southern history.

[6] In 1976, he published his most well-known work, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America—a book read widely at universities across the U.S.[3] Based on deep archival research and building on extracts from this extensive and wayward literature, as his "Essay on Sources" demonstrates, Goodwyn's book entirely revises the historiography of American populism and re-establishes it on the basis of solid documentary evidence compellingly quoted.