Shortridge High School is a public high school located in Indianapolis, Indiana, United States. Shortridge is the home of the International Baccalaureate and arts and humanities programs of the Indianapolis Public Schools district (IPS). Originally known as Indianapolis High School, it opened in 1864 and is Indiana's oldest free public high school. New Albany High School (1853) was Indiana's first public high school, but was not initially free.

Author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Shortridge class of 1940, said that Shortridge was:

"... my dream of an America with great public schools. I thought we should be the envy of the world with our public schools. And I went to such a public school. So I knew that such a school was possible. Shortridge High School in Indianapolis produced not only me, but the head writer on the I LOVE LUCY show (Madelyn Pugh). And, my God, we had a daily paper, we had a debating team, had a fencing team. We had a chorus, a jazz band, a serious orchestra. And all this with a Great Depression going on. And I wanted everybody to have such a school."

Indianapolis High School (renamed Shortridge High School in 1896) opened in 1864 as the state of Indiana's first free public high school. Its original location (1864–1867) was in the former Ward 1 Elementary School at Vermont and New Jersey Streets.

The second location (1867–1872) was in Circle Hall on the northwest quadrant of Monument Circle. The third location (1872–1885) was the former Baptist Female Seminary at Michigan and Pennsylvania Streets. This building was deemed unsafe and torn down to make way for a fourth building (1885–1928) on the same site. (Classes met in area churches while the new building was under construction.) Due to population shifts in Indianapolis in the 1920s, Indianapolis Public Schools decided to build a fifth building at the northeast corner of 34th and Meridian Streets.

Construction began in 1927, and the school opened in 1928. This fifth iteration is the school's current building.

Abraham C. Shortridge was recruited to become school superintendent in 1863. Shortridge was a strict educator when it came to drilling students and faculty alike. However, he was also innovative in many ways, including the hiring of female teachers and the admission of African-American students. Sarah D. Allen Oren Haynes, who taught at the high school from 1869 to 1873, later became the first female state librarian of Indiana and the first female professor at Purdue University. By 1878, Shortridge High School served 502 students. Roda Selleck, who began teaching art at the school in the 1880s, soon won acclaim for introducing "craftwork" – leather, pottery, jewelry, and metalwork – to the curriculum, and later developed a line of pottery, "Selridge Pottery", designed by students. She remained at the school until her death in 1924.

In 1876, Mary Alice Rann was the first African-American student to graduate from Shortridge High School. There was a push for either integration in schools or the building of a new school for African-American students. Abraham Shortridge, who had become the superintendent of IPS schools at the time, fought against the arguments from white parents, asking if they wanted to pay the taxes to build a new school just for her. She was the first of a number of black students to graduate from Shortridge prior to the opening of Crispus Attucks High School.