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Sometime in the early 20th century, usage of the now-historical kana ゐ and ゑ (and their katakana equivalents) dropped off, being replaced with い and え in modern Japanese. What exactly happened here and why?

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Because the pronunciation was lost. "Wi" and "we" are still in some dialects, but standard Japanese does not have those sounds. These characters were just spelling. Similarly in English, we pronounce "through" as "thru" because the "gh" sound is long gone and "thru" is now a common variant spelling used in the US (I.E. Drive Thru)

After World War II there was a massive language overhaul, and they changed/standardized spelling and also made the Toyo (revised to Joyo) kanji list.

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    As Nate said, it was because there was confusion with other characters which sounded similar. Wikipedia has more info for Wi and We
    – Chris Gaunt
    May 31, 2011 at 23:30
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    I would be very interested to know in which dialects these sounds still appear.
    – hippietrail
    Jun 1, 2011 at 9:22
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    These are not used in any dialects, as long as you don't count Ryukyuan languages (such as Okinawan or Amami) as a dialect.
    – Boaz Yaniv
    Jun 3, 2011 at 10:03
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    Man, I wish we could have a Language overhaul for english and drop all the silent characters in our spelling conventions.
    – Nathan
    Jun 7, 2012 at 16:07
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    Note that Japanese had a huge language overhaul during the Meiji period as well, which did the rather different thing of standardizing how to spell the silent stuff :P
    – ithisa
    Aug 15, 2013 at 2:12

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