LFE-Related History

History of Lisp - 1956 through 1962. The paper presented by John McCarthy at the first HOPL conference in 1978.
The Evolution of Lisp - 1960 through 1992. The paper by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel at HOPL II in 1993 which picks up where McCarthy left off in his 1978 paper.
History of LISP - This is an amazing resource which aims to preserve as much Lisp history as possible. (The Software Preservation Group is backed by the world-class Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, USA.)
Herbert Stoyan collection on LISP programming - The Herbert Stoyan collection on LISP programming contains materials documenting the origins, evolution, and use of the LISP programming language and many of its applications in artificial intelligence.

A Universal Modular Actor Formalism for Artificial Intelligence - Like Lisp, the Actor Model had its roots in Artificial Intelligence research. This 1973 paper is the one that introduced the world to the Actor Model, which Erlang subsequently brought to the programming world of telecommunications and distributed systems.
ACTORS: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems - Gul Agha's PhD. thesis which anticipated Erlang by about a year. (Note that Joe Armstrong was not aware of Dr. Agha's work at the time of Erlang's conception.)
Actor Model of Computation: Scalable Robust Information Systems - a 2010 paper by Carl Hewitt (which he has updated regularly for the past four years). This provides a very nice, modern overview.

A History of Erlang - Joe Armstrong's 2007 paper which he presented at the HOPL III conference.
Erlang Timeline, 1982 - 1993.
The True story about why we invented Erlang ... [video | slides] - Mike Williams presents at Erlang Factory London 2011.
Video interview with Mike Williams - History of Erlang, Modeling, and Large Scale Design (Erlang Factory London 2011).
A History of the Erlang VM [video | slides] - Robert Virding talks about the various incarnations of the Erlang Abstract Machine at Erlang Factory San Francisco 2011.
26 years with Erlang - Joe Armstrong tells us how he got his grey hairs at a 2013 Chicago Erlang Meetup.
A Brief History of Erlang - an essay for a course on the Principles of Programming Languages.

Original Announcement - in 2008, Robert Virding announced the first release of LFE on the Erlang mail list
LFE's first commit - though this first public commit was in August, Robert had been working on LFE since March of 2008.
Adding a new flavour to Erlang - The first presentation/talk given on LFE by Robert Virding at the Erlang User Conference in October 2008.