Prof. Travis Vogan's new book,Keepers of the Flame:NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, will be released by the University of Illinois Press next month.

From the UI Press website:

NFL Films changed the way Americans viewed professional football. In Keepers of the Flame: NFL Films and the Rise of Sports Media, Travis Vogan presents NFL Films' rise from a small independent production company to a marketing machine Sports Illustrated called "perhaps the most effective propaganda organ in the history of corporate America."

Drawing on research at the NFL Films Archive and the Pro Football Hall of Fame and interviews with media pioneer Steve Sabol and others, Vogan traces how NFL Films constructed a romanticized, remarkably visible mythology for the National Football League by packaging pro football as a heroic sequence of violent and beautiful gridiron battles. John Facenda's honeyed "Voice of God" baritone and Sam Spence's soaring scores merged with the epic poetry in Steve Sabol's scripts to create a hugely successful entertainment formula still used today.

Vogan also shows the company's relationship with and vast influence on our culture's representations of sport, the expansion of sports television beyond live game broadcasts, and the emergence of cable television and Internet sports media. His analysis presents sports media as an integral facet of American popular culture, and NFL Films as key to the transformation of pro football into the national obsession known as America's Game.