WHEN A COMPANY undertakes the gathering of its own corporate history, an essential ingredient in the effort is the endorsement and support of the company's top management. Without this, the program will lack the carrying power to see it through to a successful completion. If the company ranks as one of the largest in American and world business,' the challenges of compiling its history will assume the same scale, and so will the importance of management support. With Atlantic Richfield Company, as the article by Enid Douglass notes, the inspiration for an interrelated group of history projects sprang directly from the concern of board chairman Robert O. Anderson and then-president Thornton E Bradshaw2 that the company was leaving the long and instructive history of