Hm, is history important? There's wikipedia if you're interested in the 'history' of a specific algorithm. For the rest, most books I've seen have pseudo-code, which is easy to translate to code.

The classic textbooks are:

  * "Algorithms" by Robert Sedgewick et al.
  * "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et al.

If you're extremely serious about algorithms, you might wanna go directly with the bible: TAOCP[1].

[1] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/taocp.html