Short answers, pulled from the story.
Currier and Ives operated from 1835 to 1907, a span of 72 years. Nathaniel Currier established the firm in 1835, and the name Currier and Ives was adopted in 1857 when James Merritt Ives became a full partner. The firm was liquidated in 1907 as demand for lithographs declined due to improvements in offset printing and photoengraving.
Nathaniel Currier was born on the 27th of March 1813, in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and founded the firm after apprenticing at a Boston lithography shop at age fifteen. James Merritt Ives was born on the 5th of March 1824, in New York City, and joined the firm as a bookkeeper and accountant before becoming a full partner in 1857. Ives was connected to Currier through family: his wife Caroline Clark was the sister-in-law of Nathaniel's brother Charles.
Currier and Ives published at least 7,500 lithographs over the firm's 72 years of operation, producing more than a million prints by hand-colored lithography. Artists generated two to three new images every week for 64 years, from 1834 to 1895.
The Darktown Comics were a series of prints produced by Currier and Ives that depicted African Americans in demeaning and racist ways. According to Albert Baragwanath, more than half of the firm's approximately 500 comic prints belonged to this series. According to J. Michael Martinez, every print in the series was a bestseller, with at least one selling 73,000 copies.
Each print began on a lithographic limestone plate prepared entirely by hand, a process that often took more than a week per stone. Prints were pulled by hand on hand-operated presses. A team of a dozen or more women, many of them German immigrants with art training, colored each print by assembly line, one color per worker, and were paid $6 for every 100 prints they colored.
Small prints sold for five to twenty cents each, while large prints sold for one to three dollars. The firm distributed through pushcart vendors, peddlers, bookstores, and mail order, and established wholesale outlets across the country and a London office for international sales.