Essay competitions?

Are there any instructions as to what kind of history you should write about or what the theme of the essay is? E.g. write an essay about a historical figure, or write about the childhood in history.

So, there are a few that I'm interested in. One of them concerns the 1960s and whether there was a cultural revolution. I was thinking I could include oral history from people who lived through the time (family members, etc) but I don't know if that would be seen as inappropriate. There was another question on medieval history that interested me because I haven't studied it a great deal and would like to challenge myself (concerning whether the lives of kings are more interesting than peasants).
I could borrow some books from a local library on it but I feel like it would be incomplete without primary sources.

Those both sound interesting. For the second one I found a guide to online primary sources which seems like a compilation of websites with sources on different topics including Medieval (Link below). Some require a login but there are some that don't. Check it out and see if it's what you are looking for.

https://ucsd.libguides.com/primarysources/medieval