The national museum of Haiti, housed in a circular modernist building beneath the Champs de Mars, tells Haiti's history from the pre-Columbian Taíno through the revolutionary period to the present. The collection includes artefacts from the 1791 slave revolt and the Haitian Revolution of 1804 — the only successful slave revolution in history — as well as portraits of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion, the founding fathers of the republic.
The centrepiece exhibit is dedicated to the revolution, with documents, weapons, and personal objects from the generals who defeated Napoleon's army and created the first Black republic in the world. The anchor said to be from Columbus's Santa María is also on display. The museum is on the Champs de Mars, Port-au-Prince's main civic plaza, which itself has several monuments worth seeing.