Visual Programming Languages: A Survey - This paper by Marat Boshernitsan includes an historical overview of some of the pioneering efforts in the field. - http://nitsan.org/~maratb/cs263/
The Semicolon Wars - History and critique of disagreements over language design details, citing some specific traits; by Brian Hayes. American Scientist. - http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51982/
O'Reilly: The History of Programming Languages - A poster plots over 50 programming languages on a multi-layered, color-coded timeline. - http://oreilly.com/news/languageposter_0504.html
History and Evolution - A list of computer languages and some links to compilers for these languages. - http://www.scriptol.org/history.php
The History of Computer Programming Languages - Short concise article on programming language history with some links. - http://www.princeton.edu/~ferguson/adw/programming_languages.shtml
Wikipedia: PL/I - An encyclopedia description of PL/I history with many links to programming terms. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PL/I_programming_language
Historic Documents in Computer Science - Original, historic first documents for many early programming languages, like language manualsa, scanned and converted to PDF form. - http://www.fh-jena.de/~kleine/history/
Diagram of Languages - Two diagrams showing how many languages are related to each other. - http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/diagram.html
Computer Languages History - Timeline chart, 1954 to today, printable; links to homes of many languages. - http://www.levenez.com/lang/
A Brief History of Programming Languages - A special Byte Magazine article published for Byte's 20th anniversary special report - http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm