October 1 - Three thousand student activists at the University of California, Berkeley, surround and block a police car from taking a CORE volunteer arrested for not showing his ID, when he violated a ban on outdoor activist card tables. This protest eventually explodes into the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.

The Shinkansen high-speed rail system, the world's first such system, is inaugurated in Japan, for the first sector between Tokyo and Osaka.

October 5 - Twenty-three men and thirty-one women escape to West Berlin through a narrow tunnel under the Berlin Wall. Elizabeth II and The Duke of Edinburgh begin an 8-day visit to Canada.

October 10 – The 1964 Summer Olympics are held in Tokyo, Japan, the first in an Asian country.

October 12 – The Soviet Union launches Voskhod 1 into Earth orbit as the first spacecraft with a multi-person crew and the first flight without space suits. The flight is cut short and lands again on October 13 after 16 orbits.

October 14 – American civil rights movement leader Martin Luther King Jr. becomes the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, which is awarded to him for leading non-violent resistance to end racial prejudice in the United States.

October 14 – Nikita Khrushchev is deposed as leader of the Soviet Union; Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin assume power.

October 15 – 1964 United Kingdom general election: The Labour Party wins a narrow victory over Sir Alec Douglas-Home's Conservative Party, which has been in power for 13 years. The new prime minister is Harold Wilson.

October 17 – The People's Republic of China explodes an atomic bomb in Sinkiang.

October 22 - Canada: A Federal Multi-Party Parliamentary Committee selects a design to become the new official Flag of Canada. A 5.3 kiloton nuclear device is detonated at the Tatum Salt Dome, 21 miles (34 km) from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as part of the Vela Uniform program. This test is the Salmon phase of the Atomic Energy Commission's Project Dribble.

October 24 – Northern Rhodesia, a former British protectorate, becomes the independent Republic of Zambia, ending 73 years of British rule.

October 26 – Eric Edgar Cooke becomes the last man executed in Western Australia, for murdering 8 citizens in Perth between 1959 and 1963.

October 27 – In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, rebel leader Christopher Gbenye takes 60 Americans and 800 Belgians hostage.

October 29 – A collection of irreplaceable gemstones, including the 565-carat (113.0 g) Star of India, is stolen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. (source: Wikipedia)