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Although painfully incomplete, the following list should offer some readily available web sources on type history and design. The "and printing" is new, and thus even more incomplete--so if you find something interesting in your web-travels, let me know.
Typography: History and Design
Type Design, Typography, and Graphic Images. This is Nicholas Fabian's home page, and contains a section on early masters of typography. I do miss Graphion's page design, though.
Evolution of type: a succinct, well-designed history of letters and typography, from a design studio called mediumbold.
Museums of Typography. This site may prove helpful, although it's not yet complete.
SoTA is the home of the Society of Typographic Aficionados, for those who can never get enough of this stuff.
The Cavendish Gallery of Print and Typography This British type museum offers two options: Flash and non-Flash versions of the site. The non-Flash version has more information and can be gone through more quickly, but the Flash version is nicely constructed and provides a good example of how to use Flash effectively (and elegantly) on an informational website.
Several font companies have historical information on the development of typefaces in general:
P22 Type Foundry I own several fonts from these folks. Their pages provide histories of their designs, most of which are based on the works or the handwriting of noted artists. The Da Vinci font, for instance, comes both in standard and reverse forms, so you can do mirror writing in Da Vinci's own hand if you really want to confuse people.
Type.co.uk I knew this once as FontWorks, but there's apparently a Japanese company by that name--which might explain the change. The Travelling Typographer section under "News" features an occasional magazine with articles of interest.
The Scriptorium at Ragnarok Press. This page specializes on turn-of-the-century images and fonts related to movements such as Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement. The offer a number of fonts for sale, and features some trial versions of shareware fonts for downloading.
The Open Directory Project offers a long list of Typography links, some of which undoubtedly appear above, but which seem pretty comprehensive on first glance.
Typographical Grab Bag: Here's an article from the Milwaukee Journal about an exhibit on the history of type at the Eisner Museum of Advertising and Design. The article might lead you to some interesting stuff if you conduct searches on some of the names mentioned. This page for a course advanced typography at Cal State Fresno offers some interesting exercises.
Printing History and Technologies
Dr. Leslie and the Composing Room An MFA thesis project by Erin Malone, Rochester Institute of Technology, 1994. Deals with the period between 1934 and 1942, and specifically with the work of Dr. Robert Leslie, whose purpose in life was the "education and betterment of the printing and graphic arts industry." Everybody's portfolio should have a piece like this.
Introduction to Letterpress Printing in the 21st Century. Lots of information, responsibly maintained.
Ireland's National Print Museum provides a history of printing in Ireland, which I've included because of my Scots-Irish heritage.
More information on the history of writing and printing can be found on my topic links for Humanities.