Ah, a history course, right up my alley :-) I got my history degree online. Participate in class (it can be very much like here only a different subject :-) a lot and do a lot of writing about subjects and asking more questions and discussing there, in the classroom, and that can help you get the flow of topics and remember points better (works for me better than reading stuff).

Find something interesting about each section of the course that you want to learn and engage with it and you shouldn't have any problems. The biggest problems I had was looking at what was going to be taught the semester, at the beginning of the course and getting scared, but I learned to keep focused on only the section I was supposed to be working on right then and everything flowed along like it was supposed to and I didn't have to worry about graduating from high school when I was only in sixth grade or something :-) If you have to write multiple papers, don't think about the number of them, just do them one-by-one, stick a wall up about the future to keep from worrying.